La Navigazione di San Brandano (The Voyage of Saint Brendan)

On Friday, May 29, 2026, at 8:30 pm, in the former Church of San Mattia in Bologna, Fontanamix presents The Voyage of Saint Brendan.

A musical voyage inspired by one of the most fascinating travel texts of medieval literature, written in Latin probably in the 10th century, later spread throughout Europe through numerous manuscripts, and said to have even inspired Dante’s Divine Comedy.

On one side there is the symbolic journey of the Navigatio of Saint Brendan, who, together with the holy navigators aboard his currach (a traditional Celtic boat made of wood and leather), encounters a winding and unpredictable path composed of “stations”, random and imaginative islands, in search of the Promised Land, a recurring theme in medieval legends. On the other side lies the real journey, that of the narrative itself: the account of an adventurous voyage undertaken in the 1970s by Irish writer and explorer Tim Severin, inspired by and retracing the details of Saint Brendan’s medieval tale, according to which the saint may have reached the islands of the North Atlantic and perhaps even the Americas.

The symbolic and evocative dimension is entrusted to the instrumental adventures of a solo violin — inspired by the virtuosity of Pietro Antonio Locatelli — which becomes the protagonist of a sound theatre suspended in the mist of electronic sound, evoking mysterious and fabulous lands. In the real journey, the narrator’s voice weaves together the story of the Irish wooden-and-leather boat. At the end, a young boy (a treble voice) reveals on the Island of the Blessed why the navigators were kept at sea for seven years before reaching the longed-for land: “You could not find it earlier because God wished to show you many of His secrets in the vastness of the ocean.”

After all, as James Hillman wrote, “the ocean invites the human world to adventure”, and here the Navigatio Sancti Brendani becomes a metaphor for a musical journey made of adventurous sounds.

11 scenic-musical stations for narrator, treble voice, violin and live electronics (world premiere).

• Francesco La Licata music
• Bruno Cappagli dramaturgy and staging
• Bruno Cappagli narrator
• Awar Soncini treble voice
• Elicia Siverstein violin
• Francesco Vogli sound design