10 Act I / Poggio al Tesoro in the Spotlight 11 Act I / Poggio al Tesoro in the Spotlight What drives a producer of wine with deep roots in his home territory, intimately tied to his historic grape varieties, with a profound intimacy with the aromas and flavors which he has known his entire life to leave home in search of an entirely new territory to discover, a different soil to cultivate, new grapes to grow, new tastes to master in order to seduce and be seduced? It is a mystery wrapped in the deepest mists of irrationality, seasoned with the evanescence of our dreams, by secret ambitions, by atavistic premonitions; difficult, accordingly, to rationally explain, to the point that we ourselves will not attempt to explain it. What we, instead, shall do is to let ourselves be seduced by the irrational and by dreams in order to tell this story. We shall attempt to recount it in a way which is so novelistic and simulated that it will become more real than the reality itself. Indeed, as though it were easy to describe reality, as though it were easy to establish what is real and what is imaginary, what is partial, what is clear, what is imaginary and what is the truth. Through which and how many mediations of experience, of culture, of human sensibility do we succeed, on occasion, in finding an interpretive key, the true explanation, only later to be unexpectedly and unpredictably proven wrong by a foolish, insignificant, vulgar, vapid banality? In a second’s time everything collapses, the entire sand castle which we have constructed piece by piece gives way, implodes, and disintegrates leaving nothing behind. And then welcome to arbitrariness, fiction, invention because, at that point, our falsities will be truer than so-called reality. It’s theater, the theater of life. That described by Miguel de Cervantes in his Don Quixote de la Mancha: “the scepters and the crowns of emperors are but tin and tinsel”. Yet for a few minutes before our eyes there is a real emperor with a real crown and scepter and we listen to him, we watch him, and we take him to be a real sovereign. This story as well will perhaps be decorated with tin and tinsel, but not for this will it be less real, less anguished, less fascinating, less inspiring than many another story with the pretext of telling us the truth. the story is called poggio al tesoro and it celebrates it’s tenth anniversary. Poggio al Tesoro in the Spotlight prologue Act I Scene I On the right: The Via Bolgherese vineyard and, in the background, the Hermitage of Castiglioncello Next pages: Le Sondraie and the Fossa Camilla creek
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NDMxMQ==