From the Roman avant-garde to the classics. Rina Tamburi was a director who loved challenges and rigor

“Italians are not a racist people. They simply hate each other”: while I was driving towards San Casciano in Val di Pesa on a tedious early summer afternoon, on my way to the Nicolini Theater, I mulled over that paradoxical subtitle, second only to the hilarious and ferocious verses of Toti Scialoja (“The secret dream / of the crows of ‘Orvieto / is to put to death / the crows of Orte”) in underlining one of our most famous characteristics, the parochial Schadenfreude, and I wondered what kind of show would be Sa Razza (The race in Sardinian). He was the one who recommended it to me Julian Ferrara, or rather the director himself: his only polite suggestion to my activity as theater reviewer of Panorama, in that memorable 1997 in which Giuliano passed like a meteor through the corridors of Segrate leaving an indelible mark and a great regret. I therefore owe to him, among other things, the discovery of Rita Drumswho from Giordano Raggi’s Sa race – a story more relevant than ever of three conscripts who ended up as a punishment as a lookout on an Apulian beach where the landing of a ship of Albanian refugees is feared – pulled off a sober and lucid show on intolerance, in a wise crescendo of tension.