Franz Kafka on stage at Futa, the adventure of the theater inside the Germanic cemetery on the Apennines

For some time the theater finds space outside the rooms, but it is always exceptional to find a place that enters the show as happens to Germanic military cemetery, Futa passbetween Florence and Bologna, where, until 17 August, every day at 6 pm, it goes on stage The process by Franz Kafkaon the occasion of the centenary of the publication, posthumously and with the intervention of his friend Max Brod, of the novel in 1925.

Archivefounded in 1999 by Gianluca Guidotti and Enrica Sangiovanni, who brought here for four years The enchanted mountain by Thomas Mann And many other shows before, resumes the unfinished novel of the Prague author written in German between 1914 and 1915 and revised until 1917. In 2025 the first part of the project that will continue in the next few years always in the cemetery space: an intertwining that is not accidental. The process is a labyrinth of indifference and bureaucracy of which it is difficult to find a reason and there is no place where the incomprehensible shows itself better than in a war cemetery, a cemetery where men of the Army of Nazi Germany are buried.

The path

“In this cemetery, 30683 Germanic fallen of the Second War Worlds rest.” There are these words engraved at the entrance of the cemetery, from here starts the path of the show to be done in silence and with the phone off. It is immediately understood that there is another interpreter in addition to the actors that can be seen in the distance climbing towards the central monument of the cemetery, a high stone blade: It is nature. The wind accompanies the representation, the clouds are the backdrop, the green, dotted with the tombstones, is the companion of the spectator who can turn from each side and get lost in the landscape at 360 degrees. The representation is itinerant, you enter and exit the monument, pass on the sides, the background are the peaks of the Apennines.

We are at 900 meters of the Futa pass, a pass between Emilia-Romagna and Tuscany. Already arriving here is a journey: about sixty kilometers from Bologna and as many from Florence. We arrive with the Statale della Futa and with the highway, the exit is Firenzuola. If you choose the old A1 route, go from Pian del Vo I want and cross bruscoli that reports one of the museums of the Gothic line of these parts. Even those who walk the path of the gods can deviate and get here.

The show

The authors explain that “the idea of setting up Kafka after Thomas Mann at the Futa Pass cemetery seemed natural. After four years spent on the Enchanted mountain It was not at all simple to free himself and get off the Berghof. The fact that the two novels were published one year later (1924 and 1925), that Kafka started writing The process just as the Great War was bursting (1914) and while Hans Castorp (the protagonist of the Mountain) He started, singing Schubert, to the trenches and that Kafka in turn was a guest of the sanatorium because of his tuberculosis on the larynx and that precisely that same illness led him to death on June 3, 1924 in the Sanatorio di Kierling, near Vienna, well All these intertwining have attracted us, they seem almost obliged to be obliged to reality and literature».

Even if you are over 900 meters above sea level and for the most of the time of the outdoor show, claustrophobia and everything that recalls the word is heard in the scene Kafkian: restless, anguished, desolate, paradoxical, hallucinating, absurd, according to the definition of the Treccani vocabulary. “The court is attracted to guilt.” “No act must be lost, the court does not forget anything.” Kafka says so, you find it in this theatrical path and feel without escape as Joseph K taking steps into this monument to the collective memory of violence and tragedies of history and those in progress.

The cemetery that has become a stage

Gianluca Guidotti and Enrica Sangiovanni entered this place for the first time in 2002. They are the ones to tell it in the volume Teatro di Marte Curated by Elena Pirazzoli with photos of Franco Guardascione. For a year, they had lived on the Apennines, after working with Luca Ronconi and shot between Europe and the USA interviewing Elie Wiesel on the trail of the Shoah. “We looked around. There was wind. We had no doubts. We thought Aeschylus. We said the Persians. So everything started. The oldest tragedy, the only one with a historical subject, an exercise in disassembly of identities ». From that first tragedy we moved on to many classics of Greek theater and literature: from Homer to Sophocles. And then Pasolini, Shakespeare and Dostoevsky. “We never moved and yet we have gone through all the times and all spaces.”

This cemetery is not the only Germanic military in Italy, but it is the largest. It welcomes many of the victims of the fighting on the Gothic line. Buried in different points, the remains were brought here after the agreement signed by Italy and Germany in 1957. The inauguration is dated 1969the trait that distinguishes this place is sobriety. It hosts mostly young, infantrymen and officers of low degree: it is the scene of death and theater of Mars, it is a sense of sense that seems to be born for the shows and be even capable of inspiring it.

Archive
The process
first trial
by Franz Kafka
On the occasion of the centenary of the publication of the novel 1925/2025
From 1 to 17 August 2025 at 18 at the Futa Pass cemetery (FI)
dramaturgy and direction Gianluca Guidotti and Enrica Sangiovanni
With Mattia Bartoletti Stella, Diana Dardi, Gianluca Guidotti, Pouria Jashn Tirgan, Giuseppe Losacco, Andrea Maffetti, Enrica Sangiovanni
Patrizio Barontini musical advice
Scenography, costumes, objects Gianluca Guidotti and Enrica Sangiovanni

Inputs: full € 25 – Reduced € 15
Limited reservations required www.archiviozeta.eu