My eyes that loved you so much. (Luigi Tenco)

In the Salento dialect, mappugghje are junk, bric-a-brac, those things that accumulate in wallets, drawers, and tin boxes—things we preserve despite their limited material value. We entrust them with pieces of our hearts, of travels, of memories, and ask them to guard them while we wait to put them away in the attic. A wait that a singular Penelope, a character in this story told through body and voice, experiences in the stillness of a small house. She has been waiting with devotion for time immemorial. She moves silently among the mappugghje of her heart, attempting to recapture their thread, inexorably destined to dissolve like sugar in yet another cup of coffee. A canvas itself, a "plot" without which Ulysses, the husband, would be nothing but a desperate hero wandering aimlessly, she narrates to us, with the same lack of chronological order as Molly Bloom, her "vision" as a patient, seated woman, her packing and unpacking of suitcases, the symbolic journey she undertakes in pursuing and apprehending the magic inherent in "small" everyday life, through an interior nomadism that is a solitary, attentive listening to herself and to the domestic, earthly, safe world around her. In waiting, she experiences herself (since he who waits finds, while not waiting only guarantees non-discovery). In a repetition of gestures, in a consolidation of habits, her being nourishes the internal time of knowledge, nourishes her soul, her capacity to listen. Meanwhile, the mappugghje are preserved, accumulated, replaced, in a succession of overlapping times where even the scene transforms, organized according to a waiting that at times seems futile, at times nostalgic, at times even complacent. And yet unpredictable, dynamic, reflective, a "wandering" that presents the protagonist as an "Ulysses without Ithaca," lost to the inexhaustible flow of days, like a glass into which we pour water, yet never full. This is, therefore, the chronicle of a motionless journey, a state of being in tension, in at/tension, in at/tense. A dimension of the human nous that replaces "feminine" welcome and understanding with "masculine" intrusion and conquest. A state of being firmly tied to the earth, like the olive trunk on which Ulysses nailed his nuptial bed. Observing the tiny part of the world that never reaches beyond the horizon of the gaze, and within it the sound of silence that precedes an awaited return, and within this silence, the gentle sound of the surf and the wind, the sound of lungs filling with air and blood flowing through veins, the sound of living, creaking wood, a sound that only those who have time to wait can partake in. This work, the fruit of two years of research punctuated by choreographic residencies held in Italy and Portugal, sees two different languages coexist on stage in dialogue, dance and prose, set in a space of undefinable genre—neither dance nor theater, but both languages woven into two parallel and "incidentally" linked stories. Its narrative structure is intended to respond to the principal dramaturgical choice of a non-linear time-space, a chronological disorder that replaces logic and direction in the hero Ulysses' sea voyage with the complex, rich interior wanderings of the expectant bride. It so happens that the woman is on stage, at the same time the young Penelope at the dawn of a solitary wait for the future (the body of the dancer Chiara Michelini) and the elderly woman who has waited indefinitely and who, not always lucid, sometimes forgets the object of this persistent waiting, is ready to share with us, through the voice of the actress Maria Cristina Valentini, her passionate, loving, at times disillusioned travel diary. (S. Mazzotta)