The Piccolo’s Harlequin, a record show, the Italian production most seen worldwide, is reborn for the twelfth time in seventy-eight years on the stage of Via Rovello, in a new edition staged by Stefano de Luca, with Enrico Bonavera and a cast of graduate actors from the Piccolo Academy of Theatre. 
In an era of highly technological productions, the masks of the Commedia dell’Arte, the candles, the props and the Eighteenth-century brocade express another way of creating theatre: «a simple game, as ancient as humankind – explains de Luca – a territory in which infancy and ancestral rites come together in the joy of masking, orchestrated by a script of gestures and movements studied by Giorgio Strehler to allow each individual character to contribute to collective harmony.» 
As always a symbol of passage from generation to generation, it will be a show full of memories, with a thought to the artists, masters and technicians who have come and gone over the years, passing on the immortal art of a «marvellous anachronism or a timeless show, in which the language is a constant interweaving of Italian dialect, hybrids and contaminations, the expression of an Italy whose uniqueness speaks to the whole world.»