Il Mago di Redonda - Alle origini dell’anima giocosa di Umberto Eco

On Friday 6 and Saturday 7 November 2026, the Teatro Arena del Sole presents, in the Sala Leo de Berardinis, Il Mago di Redonda - Alle origini dell’anima giocosa di Umberto Eco, starring Lino Guanciale.

Lino Guanciale pays tribute to the writing of Umberto Eco, exploring the origins of his relationship with play, knowledge and imagination. On the anniversary of Eco’s death, at the end of the ten-year period of silence that the writer himself had imposed on his entire body of work, ERT presents Il Mago di Redonda, a theatrical journey in search of “Eco before he became Eco”: his childhood, his youthful imagination and the early forms of an encyclopaedic curiosity already shaped by invention and irony.

A staged reading freely inspired by Fenomenologia di Umberto Eco by Michele Cogo, who also collaborated on the project, the performance rediscovers the writer’s formative roots. It portrays the intellectual who, more than almost any other, was able to bring high culture and popular culture into dialogue. The island of Redonda – a kingdom of fantasy – becomes the symbol of a world suspended between reality and fiction, knowledge and imagination, rules and creativity.

World premiere

Freely inspired by Fenomenologia di Umberto Eco (Michele Cogo, Baskerville 2010)
Dramaturgy: Michele Cogo and Lino Guanciale
Direction and performance: Lino Guanciale
Production: Emilia Romagna Teatro ERT / Teatro Nazionale
Photo by Matteo Nardone