KEEP CALM AND POTA

KEEP CALM AND POTA

Apr 13, 2024 | ART, ART, CULTURE, CULTURE, WOMEN, WOMEN

Keep calm and pota!

Don’t say you’re not already smiling thinking to Keep calm and pota.

I immediately lit up, also because Keep calm and pota is curated by Piöcc’s Café.

Café! A coincidence, or rather, I would directly say a sign.

A sign that I immediately grasped when I contacted the Teatro Centro Lucia in Botticino Sera.

Yes, you read that right: theatre.

Elena kindly explained that their artistic direction in recent seasons has been proposing a review of dialectal comedies from the Brescia area entitled ‘Èl bel del dialet a teàter’.

As I have already mentioned, I am very fond of dialect. 

Keep calm and pota is therefore a dialect comedy, and Cafè di Piöcc a theatre company.

Elena also helped me contact the director: Manuela.

In two words: a revelation!

Quoting Queen Agatha:
A clue is a clue, two clues are a coincidence, but three clues make a proof.

Keep Calm, Coffee and Friendship. 

The founders of the Café di Piöcc are three friends who meet in the parvis of the cathedral church in Montichiari.

Money is tight and friends watch the gentlemen eat pastries and drink wine, but they can only afford water from the fountain: the Café di Piöcc then, that is, the poor man’s café.

At Cafè di Piöcc, stories, gossip and historical facts are told.

From these tales, one of the first theatre companies in Brescia was born in 1970, a troupe that was also the subject of a university thesis.

Manuela joined the company, gradually performing various tasks: props girl, prompter, actress with a small part, assistant director.

Until one evening in the rehearsal room she picked up a book from which an envelope came out with a letter that no one had ever seen.

Destiny, magic, what would you call it?

In this letter, Beppe Boschetti, one of the three founding friends, had expressed his wish to leave the company in Manuela’s hands.

A story made up of people, a long journey made up of extremely remarkable theatre works such as I tre innocenti (The Three Innocents), inspired by news events, or Semplicemente donna (Simply Woman): a red chair and 49 changes of clothes representing the stages of life up to menopause.

And yet settings and periods vary while the common denominator remains the titles that are idioms, e.g. Petost che peji l’è mei insi or Ogné come la sàpes stada.

All the way to Keep Calm and pota.

Pota is the word that unites Brescia and Bergamo, an intercalary that, pronounced with the typical accent, is always very nice.

The author had the intuition to combine pota with the expression keep calm, linking up with Freud’s truth, the female Ego interjecting itself with the Super Ego, and communicating a message: love wins.

Speaking of messages, the Cafè di Piöcc also collaborates with the municipality of Montichiari for social work with the Legality in short project. 

It can therefore be said that Cafè di Piöcc keeps calm but is unstoppable!

Many many compliments and a special thanks to Manuela Danieli.

SILENT DEATHS

SILENT DEATHS

Jan 23, 2021 | ENVIRONMENT

I have already talked about PM2.5 because frankly it is a topic that is very close to my heart and I find it absolutely important, despite continuing to pass more or less in silence.

The effects on health are hidden and manifest over time, there are no obvious infections or symptoms, but when the disease is noticed in many cases it is late.

The death tolls are terrible and yet they are rarely mentioned.

I find the latest publication from The Lancet Planetary Health absolutely frightening which indicates Brescia and Bergamo in first and second place among the European cities for mortality rate due to these damned particles.

And not only that: they are followed by Vicenza in fourth place and Saronno in eighth, meaning that out of ten cities, four are Italian, concentrated in the northern area, mainly in Lombardy.

But many other inhabited centers also have chilling levels of pollutants, available here. 

As if that were not enough, it should also be considered that despite everything there is also a hidden share: air pollution is a leading environmental cause of mortality around the world. Cities are generally hot spots for air pollution and disease. However, the exact extent of the health effects of city-wide air pollution is still largely unknown.

I have the hope of shaking some conscience, in the small, so that this theme is given an adequate echo, even if my voice falls into the same silence of all voices dull in the suffering among the indifference of most.

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