This dossier is part of the PRIN 2022 project Theatre Festivals between the Local and the Global and approaches the festival not merely as a container of events, but as a historical form and a cultural device. Focusing on the Festival Internazionale del Teatro Universitario di Parma and the Festival dei Due Mondi di Spoleto, the contributions examine the festival as a space of negotiation between artistic practices, institutional frameworks, political imaginaries, and social transformations in postwar Italy. The analysis follows the phases of genesis, duration, and transformation, placing local dynamics in dialogue with transnational networks. Methodologically, the dossier is grounded in an integrated use of archival sources, press materials, and oral history, understanding memory not as a stable repository but as a process of sedimentation and re-elaboration. From this perspective, the festival emerges as a privileged historiographical laboratory for observing dynamics of persistence, conflict, and transmission within theatrical and performative cultures.
The essay examines the emergence of the "myth" of the Festival dei Due Mondi in Spoleto (1958-1960) as a cultural, political, and symbolic construction that extends beyond mere artistic programming. Through festival catalogues, municipal archival documents, and oral sources, the study highlights Gian Carlo Menotti's role in shaping a narrative grounded in artistic freedom, patronage, and the allure of the past, addressed primarily to American audiences and patrons within the Cold War context. The Festival is connected to Spoleto's genius loci, to the "nostalgia for courts" evoked by Alberto Moravia in his editorial for the festival catalogue, and to an aesthetics of memory capable of transforming the city into an immersive experience. Rather than an event imposed from above, the Festival was grafted onto an already vibrant provincial cultural fabric, becoming a driver of urban, touristic, and identity renewal, and embodying the tensions between province and modernity in the Italy of the economic miracle.
The contribution covers the last season of the FITU (from 1973 to 1975), focusing on its defining feature: the three festivals were held under the banner of popular culture, interpreted and understood as & laquo;ethnocommitment & raquo;, according to a felicitous expression coined by one of the festival's promoters, the Parma-based director Gigi Dall'Aglio. By interweaving archival and oral sources, the latest FITU is examined as a cultural device, i.e. the site where the & laquo;debate on folklore & raquo; - a prominent theme in the postcolonial world-took theatrical features. The case studies extend beyond national borders, spanning both sides of the Mediterranean. These were the years when many student theater groups made the transition to professionalism, adopting the new legal form of cooperative teatrali; FITU's latest edition brought them together in a conference, as the contribution's final pages recall, explaining how the horizon of popular culture intertwined with the invention of new circuits and the policies of decentralization.
This article examines the 1965-1966 biennium as a pivotal moment in the history of the Festival Internazionale del Teatro Universitario di Parma (FITU). Drawing on archival and oral sources, it reconstructs the emergence of a new form of student governance and the resulting repositioning of the festival, which gradually evolved from a university showcase into a space of convergence between student theatre and experimental practices, including those associated with the professional sphere. The analysis focuses on three emblematic case studies-the New Group's happening (1965), Charles Marowitz's Hamlet staged by the Experimental Group In-Stage (1966), and the politically dissident Fuente Ovejuna by the Teatro Nacional Universitario of Madrid (1965)-which illustrate FITU's growing orientation toward aesthetic experimentation and politically engaged theatre. The biennium thus emerges as a period of profound transformation, during which the festival moved beyond the confines of an exclusively student-based experience to establish itself as an international centre for theatrical research, anticipating key dynamics of European theatre culture on the eve of 1968.
This contribution reflects on the early years of the Festival internazionale del teatro Universitario (FITU) in Parma, with an aim to highlight some issues linked to the birth and development of a university festival based on transnational theatrical, cultural and political relations. This analysis is based on an investigation of the cultural exchanges between the festival's board of directors and other national and international theatrical organizations, both university-based and professional. We will also consider, although still only partially, the multiple contexts in which the FITU operates and which its leading group has sometimes been able to influence. The article therefore seeks to highlight some aspects of the political, cultural and aesthetic dynamics that gave rise to and then structured a festival, created by young people for young people, to discover and spread original ways of approaching theatre practice and culture in the context of Italy and Europe in the 1950s.
