Lucarelli, I take you to the "black heart" of fairy tales

A guy dressed in black who comes out of the dark and makes us discover secrets, backstories and contradictions of fairy tales. It is Carlo Lucarelli in his new 8-part series 'In the company of the Wolf-The black heart of fairy tales', broadcast on Sky Arte from Monday 15 February, every week at 9.15 pm also on demand and streaming on now TV. The journey that takes us, not at all obvious, opens with Little Red Riding Hood and ends with Hansel and Gretel, passing among others for Bluebeard, Peter Pan and The Little Prince. "'Black heart' not only because we investigate the horror aspect of the fairy tale, which is something we already know but for many other things like discovering that fairy tales tell the period in which they were written, that the narration is based on facts of news or that has had real feedback that must make us think "the writer who conceived the program with Mauro Smocovich tells ANSA and obviously chose the fairy tales that had the most disturbing implications with his team composed of Beatrice Renzi, Sara Olivieri and Antonio Monti, the latter also directing. "Little Red Riding Hood is written at a time when there is a hunt for witches, for werewolves in seventeenth-century France. Bluebeard approaches a news story, that of Gilles de Rais, a well-known serial killer of sixteenth-century France. The true wolf is not what they show you, but someone else "explains Lucarelli. 'Beauty and the Beast' is very close to news stories. It is identical to a real story which is that of Pedro Consalvo, a child from the Canaries, what was then called a savage, an exotic animal. We are talking about early colonialism. As he suffered from hypertrichosis, he was covered in hair, therefore a monster. But the real beast, the bad being, was not him but the people who carried him around and showed him as a freak "says Lucarelli. Sky Arte production, made by Tiwi, with the support of the Emilia Region- Romagna, the format is similar to that of 'The disturbing muses' and 'Inseparables', again for Sky Arte. "I tell a story in a very suggestive place which is then supported by a series of interviews and, in this case, by a part made up of cartoons that illustrates what otherwise we could not have because it is difficult to find repertoire material "he explains. Among the guests writers such as Simona Vinci, who dedicated a book to Brothers Grimm and women in their fairy tales or Paola Baraldi who is an author of disturbing stories. "They have made a wonderful contribution" Lucarelli emphasizes. But there are also psychiatrists-writers and anthropologists such as Massimo Picozzi and Duccio Canestrini. For the Little Prince of Saint-Exupery, in which the flight has u of great importance, "we spoke to an aviator-writer, Alessandro Soldati, who told us what it means to fly, to get off the ground". As always, the places are suggestive and this time take us to the Anatomical Theater of Palazzo Bo in Padua and "you are already in a fairy tale" and to the fabulous Teatro Valli in Reggio Emilia. "We mainly moved behind the scenes. We went to the theater, but not on the stage of the Valli but below, where it seems to be in a sailing ship, or above where there is a wonderful chandelier that is sometimes pulled up and occupies a whole room. The anatomical looks like an Escher thing. It's a kind of funnel with a series of tunnels that run above the center where the autopsy was to take place. And it's all so cold, white, old that it's beautiful "explains Lucarelli that he shot the episodes last summer, when the pandemic seemed less intrusive but having to follow a whole series of precautions for Covid that did not make things easy. "We come from fairy tales and there are a lot of them. I've always lived in them" says the writer and does not rule out a sequel to 'In the company of the Wolf'. "If it works, there's still room for this," he says. Each episode of the series will be preceded by the publication of a podcast, available every Friday starting from February 12 on the Sky Arte website and on the main free platforms. "On the one hand there is the episode and on the other the podcast with other insights. It 's very nice because I am not of a generation close to podcasts but there is another way of feeling things that becomes important now. Yes. makes a small bridge between the two ". And after 'The Blackest Winter', his latest novel with Commissioner De Luca, released in 2020, Lucarelli has new ideas in mind and Almost Blue's Grazia Negro could reappear. "Grazia Negro has been hanging on for a while," he explains. Could he come back then? "Yes, let's see" announces the writer who did not experience the pandemic badly in his house with a garden in Mordano, the town in the province of Bologna, where he lives. "A happy island where Covid has just touched us," he says. And now he hopes that fairy tales "also help to think. We hope this happens, even with our program," he says.