Sunday November 17 @ 3:00 pm - 4:30 pm. I AM BOOKS, 189 NORTH STREET, BOSTON, MA 02113. In Sicilian with ENGLISH supertitles. $5 tickets online or at the door. Terra Matta. Based on the diaries of Vincenzo Rabito. Adapted and interpreted by Stefano Panzeri. Presented by In Scena! Italian Theater Festival NY Fall Edition

Terra Matta is adapted from the extraordinary autobiography of a Sicilian laborer at the beginning of the century, written between 1968 and 1975 on an old Olivetti. It is a monumental work: 1027 pages without spacing or margins. Terra Matta is the first-person account of the immense and intimate effort to emancipate and survive poverty; the human story of the protagonist flows in an extraordinary intertwining of major and minor history against the backdrop of the extremely poor rural Italy of the beginning of the century, surprised and torn by the Great War, the Italy of sacrificed youth, the disappointed Italy of a “fragile” victory.