La stanza di Agnese

Tuesday, March 10, 2026, at Teatro Villa Terracini in Sala Bolognese, at 9:00 PM, the play La stanza di Agnese takes the stage.

More than thirty years have passed since the Via D'Amelio massacre, a wound still open in the heart of Italy. Many investigations, trials, misdirections, and verdicts have sought a truth perhaps too hard to accept.

The Meridiani Perduti production, created in collaboration with the Scuola Antonino Caponnetto, winner of the TRAC – New Playwriting Section project and awarded the Eolo Award 2024 for Best Performance (to Sara Bevilacqua), is dedicated to Judge Paolo Borsellino on the thirtieth anniversary of his tragic death.

In 2010, Agnese Piraino Leto in Borsellino, marked by a serious illness, receives a phone call from former Italian President Francesco Cossiga: “Via D'Amelio was a coup d’état.”

Few words that inevitably bring back the memories of a lifetime, from when, as the daughter of the president of the Palermo Tribunal and immersed in the customs of the high Palermo bourgeoisie, she first meets Paolo, a young magistrate in Mazara del Vallo. From this moment begins the story of her life alongside her husband and the discovery of a different Palermo — less glamorous than what she was used to, but perhaps more beautiful, even if tragic — spanning the early years of marriage and the birth of their children.

The narrative moves through the darkest moments, including the deaths of Paolo’s friends and colleagues; the relationships with the bodyguards who become part of the family; the difficulty of the children in accepting the situation. Yet it also reveals another side of Paolo, playful and always ready for jokes, the “babbìo.” The story continues with work in the anti-mafia pool alongside Giovanni Falcone, up to Falcone’s tragic death, and finally the betrayal by those who should have stood by his side.

All this is La Stanza di Agnese. More than a monologue, it is a continuous dialogue between her and Paolo, unfolding in the folds of memory, tender when speaking of her children and indignant toward the traitors of the State.

The play was born from a long and meticulous research process that directly involved Lucia, Manfredi, and Fiammetta Borsellino, the three children of the magistrate, and Salvatore, his brother.

A dialogue of love never interrupted: Agnese Borsellino recounts Paolo, the solitude, the massacres, and a pain that time cannot extinguish.