Stefania Rocca, in Spoleto with Nobody Sees Love

"After my first directing job, with La madre di Eva, I asked myself: will I be able to go back to being 'just' an actress, without arguing with the director, because I, perhaps, see it differently?" Stefania Rocca smiles. Her answer is in L'amore non lo vede nessuno, a text by Giovanni Grasso based on his novel (ed. Rizzoli), debuting at the closing of the 68th Festival dei Due Mondi in Spoleto, from 11 to 13 July. The direction is by Pietro Maccarinelli. Produced by Compagnia Moliere, Centro Teatrale Bresciano, Teatro Quirino, Teatri di Napoli - Teatro Nazionale and then on tour from February with stops in Rome, Naples and Brescia, the show is the third theatrical collaboration between Grasso and Maccarinelli, after Fuoriusciti and Il Caso Kaufmann, and also features Giovanni Crippa and Franca Penone.

"It's a complex story, even to tell," Stefania Rocca, who returns to Spoleto two years after Alessandro Baricco's Thucydides, tells ANSA. "An existential thriller," Maccarinelli defines it. "A ruthless investigation," she says, "on the meaning of existence that forces us to face the mirror with the darkest part of ourselves and questions us on the need to forgive and forgive ourselves." It all starts with two sisters, Federica and Silvia, and the sudden death of the first. At the funeral, Silvia notices a man she has never seen before. She asks him what he is doing there, what his relationship with his sister was. Thus begins a confrontation between the two, in an escalation of mysteries. They meet every Tuesday in a bar, bound by a pact: he promised to reveal every detail of his relationship with Federica, and in exchange she promised not to do any research to reveal the identity of her interlocutor. "But to what extent - asks the director - are we willing to trust a stranger? To what extent can we reveal our most intimate secrets and make known our deepest emotions?". "There is also the theme of how sometimes we are so fixed in our point of view that we do not evaluate others - Rocca continues -. Instead, we are all judgeable when the perspective changes. The title of the show? Well, it's true, love is something so 'not concrete' that you cannot touch it, but only live it".

After so much cinema and TV, for the actress this is also a new stage in her personal journey through the theater. "I've always liked it, even if it's not easy - she says -. When the children were very small I went on tour and took them with me, not without difficulty. I always say it: a woman has to pay to work. Then, when they started school, I had to give it up. But I also love cinema madly, fiction, which have given me great satisfaction. If they offered me an interesting character, for a woman of my age, I would gladly accept. But at a certain point there was a period in which cinema was very masculine, tied to the periphery. I had little to do with it. In other countries Cate Blanchett plays Bob Marley, we are afraid. That's how, now that my children are a little older, I've rediscovered the theater, where I've found more challenging roles. Today I feel free to go back on tour. It's no coincidence that it's on stage that I made my directorial debut. The theater has given me a form of extra security, an awareness to bring out my voice and say things that otherwise perhaps I wouldn't have managed to get it out. And I already have many other ideas", she smiles. But what is it like to be directed by a director again now? "I'm still an actress - she assures -. I have no pomposity, but a lot of respect for the work of the people I choose to work with. And I'm interested in the change of point of view. That's what makes the difference".