La crociata degli innocenti

Summary

A spectral phalanx of Sicilian orphans—rag-bound, candle-eyed—trudge across volcanic rubble under the banner of Saint Rosalia, believing that if they reach the coast they will resurrect their mothers, slain in a dynastic vendetta ignited by a single mis-delivered love letter. D’Annunzio, arch-poet of excess, stages their exodus like a Stations of the Cross carved into sulphur: each child a diminutive flagellant, each horizon a fresco of cracked gold leaf. Luigi Serventi’s war-crippled friar, half Francis, half Mephistopheles, shepherds the innocents while secretly bargaining with Bianca Virginia Camagni’s widowed duchess, who trades absolution for a dowry of contraband marble. Giulietta De Riso’s nun, pale as candle wax, unpicks her vows thread by thread, her voice-over a litany of erotic psalms that dissolve into the Tyrrhenian spray. Lia Righelli’s street urchin, face smeared with ochre, believes the sea will turn to milk and yield up the dead; instead it vomits rusted rifles and wedding rings. Guido Graziosi’s one-eyed veteran photographs the march with a box camera, each magnesium flash bleaching the sky like inverse lightning, until the children themselves become celluloid, curling and burning in the projector’s gate. The crusade ends not in Jerusalem but in a ruined amphitheatre where the kids reenact the Massacre of the Innocents for a touring film company, their blood replaced by crimson petals that stick to the lens until the image itself hemorrhages.

Synopsis