My eyes that loved you so much.

Luigi Tenco

Mappugghje is a word from the Salento dialect meaning knick-knacks, trinkets, the small things that accumulate in wallets, drawers, and tin boxes—objects kept despite their little material value. To them we entrust fragments of the heart, of journeys, of memories, asking them to guard these traces until we are ready to put them away in the attic.

This waiting is lived by an unusual Penelope, the protagonist of this story told through body and voice, within the stillness of a small house. For an immeasurable time, and with devotion, she waits. In silence, she moves among the mappugghje of her heart, attempting to recover their thread—a thread inexorably destined to dissolve like sugar in yet another cup of coffee.

She herself is a fabric, a “weave” without which her husband Ulysses would be nothing more than a desperate hero wandering without destination. With the same absence of chronological order found in Molly Bloom, she recounts her own vision: that of a seated, patient woman, endlessly packing and unpacking suitcases, undertaking a symbolic journey in pursuit of the magic hidden within “small” everyday life. This journey unfolds through an inner nomadism—solitary, attentive listening to oneself and to the domestic, grounded, reassuring world that surrounds her.

In waiting, she experiences herself (for those who wait may find, while those who do not wait are guaranteed only non-discovery). Through the repetition of gestures and the consolidation of habits, her stillness nourishes the inner time of knowledge, feeds her soul, her capacity for listening. Meanwhile, the mappugghje are preserved, accumulated, replaced, chasing one another through overlapping times. Even the stage transforms itself, organizing around a waiting that sometimes appears futile, sometimes nostalgic, at times even complacent—yet always unpredictable, dynamic, reflective.

This wandering presents the protagonist as an “Ulysses without Ithaca,” slipping away from the relentless flow of days, like a glass into which water is poured and yet is never full. What unfolds is the chronicle of an immobile journey, a state of tension—of at/tention, of at/tesa (waiting). A dimension of the human nous that replaces “masculine” intrusion and conquest with “feminine” receptivity and understanding.

She remains firmly bound to the earth, like the olive trunk to which Ulysses anchored his marriage bed. She observes a tiny portion of the world, no wider than the horizon of her gaze, and within it listens to the sound of the silence that precedes an awaited return. In that silence dwell the gentle noise of the surf and the wind, the lungs filling with air, the blood flowing through veins, the living wood creaking—sounds accessible only to those who have time to wait.

This work, the result of two years of research articulated through choreographic residencies in Italy and Portugal, brings two distinct languages into dialogue on stage: dance and spoken word. It inhabits an indeterminate space—not dance and not theatre, yet both, stitched together into two parallel narratives, incidentally and delicately intertwined.

Its narrative structure responds to a precise dramaturgical choice: a non-linear time-space, a chronological disorder that replaces the logic and direction of Ulysses’ sea journey with the complex, rich inner wandering of the waiting bride. Thus, the woman appears on stage simultaneously as the young Penelope at the dawn of a solitary waiting yet to come (embodied by dancer Chiara Michelini) and as the elderly woman who has waited indefinitely, sometimes losing clarity, sometimes forgetting the object of her waiting, yet always ready—through the voice of actress Maria Cristina Valentini—to share her passionate, loving, and at times disenchanted travel diary.

(S. Mazzotta)