The “Radio Dante” project: the Divine Comedy set to music by those at the Pisa prison lands on Spotify

The radio-plays produced within the ‘Radio Dante‘ project, conceived and produced by the ‘I Sacchi di Sabbia’ theatre company, involved 15 inmates at the Don Bosco prison in Pisa, now landing on Spotify.

A series of three radio-plays on the Divine Comedy were broadcast starting from March on the radio station, Punto Radio in Cascina (Pisa). At the end of the series on November 25, the entire cycle of radio-plays presented by Marco Signori of the Scuola Normale of Pisa will be broadcast by Punto Radio and will also go on Spotify.

The musical curation and the podcast edition is by Davide Barbafiera of the Campos musical group, for the Aloch label.

The project was supported by the Fondazione Pisa and the Regione Toscana, and started on March 25 on the occasion of ‘Dantedì’. The inmates, students of the theatre company, researched the immense wealth of Dante material. Some hellish songs and characters were chosen that could better foster curiosity and interest. All the participants brought languages ​​and dialects of different origins and agreed to work together on a complex but also fascinating text.

For Francesca Censi of I Sacchi di Sabbia, “the medium of radio, as well as being rather unprecedented in a prison context, particularly lends itself to the needs of this dramatic historical period: not only from the point of view of expression, but also from that of didactic management, putting a work of sound and voice in the foreground to be listened to from afar, as if it were a live show, but at a distance”. The radio broadcasting of the RadioDante episodes made it possible to reach a wider audience, thus making a greater number of people aware of the important work such as that of the theater in prison that did not stop during the health emergency.