Il fondo del Sacco

Hunger, poverty and the omnipresence of death drove Gori from the austere everyday life in the Maggia Valley to distant California around 1927. He leaves behind his first love Maddalena, his family and friends. Twenty years later, Gori, plagued by never-ending homesickness, returns to his homeland and finds nothing as it was. Maddalena is dead, her mother is sick and her father has become old and frail. The homeland longed for in the distance has itself become strange.

In the novel "Il fondo del sacco" (Eng. "Not Beginning and Not End"), Plinio Martini, the Ticino author who died in 1979, tells the life of the poor farmers from the Maggia Valley in a realistic way and with language vibrating with suppressed anger. After several readings at the Teatro Sociale Bellinzona in October 2017, "Il fondo del sacco" has become a play on the fortieth anniversary of Martini's death, in which the actress Margherita Saltamacchia partly reads and partly performs a montage of various excerpts from the work. She is accompanied by the accordion of Daniele Dell'Agnola.