L’impossibile integrazione nella penisola italiana della "Nonne sanglante" (1835)

Abstract

This article focuses on Bourgeois and Mallian’s La nonne sanglant, a very successful French mélodrame staged for the first time in Paris in 1835 at La Porte Saint-Martin Theatre, and on the possible reasons why the subject did not encounter the pre-unification Italian theatrical prose market. Since Cammarano’s adaptation – made for Donizetti’s Maria de Rudenz (1838) – avoids almost every religious reference, this essay suggests that the absence of an Italian prose translation of La nonne sanglante during Nineteenth century could be due to at least two unacceptable aspects to the Italian public: on the one hand, the highly critical and anticlerical vision of religious orders and, on the other hand, the fearful pleasure of blood, supernatural and horror that oozes from almost every scene of the text.