The humanistic education of the society’s two components, brought us however, to focus our project on the cinematographic adaptation of a novel written between the XIX and XX century by the novelist from Siena Federigo Tozzi, “Tre Croci” (“Three Crosses”).
In the vulgate literary criticism, Tozzi is still a deeply underrated author, probably because hardly classifiable, or maybe because the troubled personal affairs of that time erased his memory. His novels, his stories, indeed, are placed between verism and subjectivism, the introspection that, on an European level was carried on by writers such as James Joyce and in Italy had its most important representative in Italo Svevo.
In Tozzi’s works can still be easily noticed descriptive parts about the landscape where the characters act; tipically veristic parts, with a psychological deepening and a characters’ interior battle which will be the feature of a lot of literature and poetry of the XX century not only in Italy. Like Federico De Roberto, great Sicialian writer, author of “I viceré” ( “The Viceroy”), Tozzi is still a novelist for the insiders, for the university conferences and it’s not a case that just on the occasion, in far 1988, the cinematography approached his works with the adaptation of the novel “Con gli occhi chiusi” (“With closed eyes”), directed by Francesca Archibugi for the silver screen.
It’s time for Tozzi to be also known by a larger audience and that he would get the credits for being a great precursor of important topics of the Twentieth century’s literature and philosophy.
The topics’ universality that “Three Croisses” proposes, from social immobility, to sibilings’ relationship, to the inability of being adult, makes Tozzi’s novel suitable and aimed at an audience not only Italian and at a young and old audience.
It’s because of this that “Three Croisses” doesn’t meant to be a strictly philological operation of the Tozzian novel.
It’s for this reason that the screeplay contains elements of strong dynamism, to avoid an end in itself filmed theater excercise.
In the adaptation for the silver screen, starting with the screenplay’s drawing, I tried to stay true to the Tozzian novel’s spirit, which transmits, at the same time, some classical, greek and Shakespearian tragedy’s elements, to the melancholy for Niccolo’s two daughters figures, marked by an uncertain future and by Modesta’s suffering.
The movie, a costume drama, will try to seize the tozzian message’s modernity, its projecting towards the future and some everlasting features of Italian’s society