Udine - Friulian Udin, Slovene Videm, German Weiden and Latin Utinum -
is a city and comune in northeastern Italy, in the middle of the Friuli-Venezia Giulia region,
located between the Adriatic Sea and the Alps (Alpi Carniche),
less than 40 km from the Slovenian border. The city could
be easily called “the Bastion of Central Europe” – not even for its location,
but primarily for the multilingualism of the whole area. The beloved
destination of Ernest Hemingway offers an insight into its historical
proportions of the Papa Joseph I.’s era in which the thought of the Tower
of Babylon was yet alive.
If you - after
passing Udine towards Maniago - overcome a labyrinth of alleys of the last
small town at the foot of the Dolomites, you might (when surmounted more or
less 300 meters of height) encounter the oldest and the most minuscule village
that can only be found on Google Maps. The village is called Frisanco and it is
honoured to be the hometown of Roberto Magro - the great clown, director and tutor
in an Italian new-circus school in Torino whose visage could be easily confused
with Tolkien's Gollum. If you have already googled the Frisanco village, you
can probably enumerate the five streets and the hotel in Via Roma... Do you
have it? – Now, scroll your view about a centimeter southwest and a certain
point in Via della Pace enters your pupil. This point indicates the virtual locus
of Robert's birthplace; it is also the place where the festival Brocante was born.
Brocante is a festival of contemporary
new-circus shows of artists from around-the-world universities of the new
circus. Every year Roberto and his team invite a dozen of artistic groups to rejuvenate
the five old streets (that you already know about) in Frisanco and three other
villages in the heart of the Dolomites with their playful pageantry. Each night
Roberto organizes several motion virtuosos to create a spectacle for the
natives of the Usher-like houses and random wanderers of northern countries,
sometimes in the square in the midst of flowing fountain, or in the courtyard
of the old padre Giulio’s flat, or even below the clearing mountain peaks with
fine trickles of the mountain waterfalls.
During the
day - that actually begins around five o’clock in the afternoon after a
whole-day riposo - you can visit
various performances, each magnificent and each placed in one of those unique villages
(relicts of former generations) within a radius of several kilometers on foot
or by scooter. And when the dark of the night falls and even the oldest native
couple appears on the square to see another fantastic show, the villages light
up thousands of lamps. And each of them has its correlate in the sky so full of
stars that Hemingway would have had to live at least twice as many years to write a poem for each of them – the stars glittering
above the beauteous region of Friuli-Venezia Giulia.
- Josefína Formanová
