Una Comédie humaine alla milanese: i Segreti di Milano e il teatro dell’esperienza

The time is now ripe for a balanced assessment of Giovanni Testori’s
work, one capable of avoiding simplifications and ideological rigidity. In
his multifaceted activity as an intellectual and artist, there is a constant focus
on theatre, the art that allows the word to be entrusted to characters,
imposing their concrete presence on stage and giving particular prominence
to the truth-value of each individual’s experience. The entire complex
narrative and dramaturgical project of I segreti di Milano can be understood
in relation to this need: it is precisely the descent into particularity
that makes it possible to grasp the universal. On the level of narrative
techniques, internal focalization and free indirect discourse make it possible
to represent experience in the making of its very process. Pluristylistic
writing then systematically blends the most humble aspects of everyday
life and the body, on the one hand, with a tension toward ultimate truths,
on the other. The macro-narrative structure itself is built upon the original
invention of “multiple plots,” which allude to the infinite multiplicity of
life and capture in depth the dynamics of Italian society in the 1950s and
1960s.