Mariano Dolci

From Retroguardia 3.0
November 9, 2025
by Francisco Soriano

Mariano Dolci belongs to the history of unique figures. The multiplicity of artistic fields inhabited by this intellectual made him a multifaceted figure, difficult for those who love to categorize. In reality, his work had a guiding star, to which Dolci devoted his entire life, an intense "poetic" activity fueled by a humanistic vision. Indeed, with "the weapons of poetry," he would soon traverse the history of our country, just as Pasolini himself, using the same tools but often in different ways, continued to undertake until his tragic end. Poetry isn't just about writing; poetry is a creative, utopian, and visionary dimension, and anyone who establishes himself in this space is a poet.

Mariano Dolci passed away on November 4th of this year. Born in Belgrade in 1937 to Gioacchino Dolci and Luigia Nitti, he was the nephew of Francesco Saverio Nitti, prime minister and a historically significant political figure. An anti-fascist, he fled in 1926 with his family, including his wife and five children. His uncle, Francesco Fausto Nitti, volunteered in Spain and fought in the Resistance in France. His father, Gioacchino, was a founder of the "Giustizia e Libertà" movement and one of the organizers of the 1929 escape from Lipari of Carlo Rosselli, Francesco Fausto Nitti, and Emilio Lussu. After exile, he returned to Rome and took part in the demonstrations that erupted in the 1960s, meeting various leaders of the opposition, including Armando Borghi, and contributing to the weekly "Umanità Nova." Between 1965 and 1969, he graduated in Mathematics and Scientific Observations, teaching in middle school. It was in the early 1960s that Dolci met the members of the experimental puppet theater company of Otello Sarzi, an Emilian partisan and anti-fascist along with the Cervi brothers. Fascinated and captivated by Otello's puppets, Dolci began a long collaboration. A talented and soon-established puppeteer, he distinguished himself for many years by serving as an artist in the primary schools of Reggio Emilia. To understand how Dolci's work has transcended multiple creative boundaries, we cite the testimony of Clemente Bicocchi, who recounts how, in 2010, he collaborated on the documentary he was about to make about an Italian-French explorer from the late 19th century. The documentary dedicated a section to animated theater. The construction of the film made use of the genius of Dolci who, says Clemente Bicocchi, also had the physique du rôle of the puppeteer 1 , a storytelling ability and humanity which in moments of stasis he also manifested with stories regarding his private life and political commitment: an anti-fascism in an anthropological vision.

Before arriving in his quintessential home, Reggio Emilia, Dolci had lived in Rome's Piazza Navona neighborhood, where he met Otello Sarzi. Sarzi's stories were powerful cultural messages, and through his artistic expression, he clearly highlighted the profound moral divide between fascists and resistance fighters. Dolci recounts his empathy for Sarzi and his debut in this world, unloading the "crates and setting up shop." Sarzi was from a family of puppeteers from Mantua, but had moved to Rome to create shows that weren't exclusively for children: the texts he translated himself were those he translated: Beckett, Mayakovsky, Garcia Lorca. Dolci understood "what language is and its power: even the constraints of the most traditional codes, in which each puppet speaks a different dialect, can allow you to express the most scathing critiques of contemporaneity; there is no need (as many have done) to necessarily distance oneself, using strange materials or choosing nonconformist texts. In this not without difficulties and in the diatribe that arose between those who supported puppet theatre and animated theatre, Dolci highlighted the shadow show based on a story by Borges, Window on Infinity . He did not understand the meaning of the contrast and was thinking, instead, of the function and modality of being artists, possibly civil and politically engaged. In various interviews he cited the suffering of the puppeteers, who had to deposit the script on stage, in the awareness that the shows were improvised along with interruptions from the audience and therefore exposed to "arbitrariness."

I would add that the lack of a proper written script is one of the most interesting aspects of the puppeteer's art, a "man of letters and poet," of his ability to transform language with neologisms and onomatopoeic sounds, so little noted in the writings of this immense artist. It's no coincidence that Dolci reminds us that there were no fascist puppeteers, and from this alone one could understand that one was on the right side. Otello Sarzi's father himself made the fascists believe that his show was aligned with the regime, only to end up in prison. Only in 1968 did some teachers from Reggio Emilia, who had attended the shows, ask for the puppeteers' company in their schools: "We had a place to live and the use of the municipal theater's office to call or leave a contact information. It represented a turning point, because until then we had neither an address nor a telephone." This act is still a source of pride for many elementary school teachers like me today. Even today, at the "Martiri Fantini" in Cervia, where I teach, Maestro Vladimiro Strinati often comes to visit us with his shows.

For Mariano Dolci, this was a turning point, with the resulting painful separation from Sarzi, which, in reality, had already been manifesting itself over time. Dolci understood that the teachers had some unique needs and that the pedagogical and civic aspects needed to be addressed with a different approach. It wasn't just about teaching, but about experimenting, and with children, it was wonderful: "Putting puppets in the hands of children and letting them express themselves was something very different from the environment I had frequented until then [...]. Furthermore, I was increasingly convinced that for us puppeteers, the time had come to adapt to modern sensibilities, a bit like painting after the advent of photography: technical skill was losing its value. Reproducing reality, the 'how good he is,' the 'it seems real'—all had to be set aside to rediscover the more symbolic, abstract value of puppets." It was a time of artless theater, where the emphasis wasn't on technical perfection but on learning, sensitivity, and the conveyance of messages through children's creativity and asymmetry, where the world could be upside down or terribly real: "The puppet's base is a stick with a ball (the head); I gave it to a psychiatric patient to make a nose and ears... she put the ears on top of her head because she always heard voices coming from above." The audience's approaches to puppets varied, and Dolci's words capture the essence: "For example, with prisoners it's even stranger: you can give the most innocent text possible, and they'll always redirect it to the concept of justice, of society that matters to them... Prisoners, even the most ignorant, quickly discover the primal power of puppets and the civic function of theater, as a place where the community's major problems are discussed. It's no coincidence that theater has existed for twenty-five centuries and for much of its existence it has always been performed outdoors; this tells you that, first and foremost, it is a service."

Dolci was an "organic" collaborator in the preschools and kindergartens of Reggio Emilia. He also understood, from Loris Malaguzzi's intuition, that school needed to be something different, like those post-war women who self-organized to found schools to take away from the priests. Malaguzzi brilliantly argued that "children have a hundred languages, but we steal ninety-nine from them." This latter trait was revolutionary considering that until then, and still largely today, teaching focused exclusively on spoken and written language, with the idea that adults transmit knowledge to children. Generally speaking, this aspect is also present, but reducing pedagogy to this is simply misleading. Thus, in those years, Dolci implemented an experimental method, arduous yet in keeping with the changing times. Not revolution, but experimentalism, where the importance of "spontaneous languages," derived from art and improvisation, was understood.

Thus the "Reggio Emilia method" became famous and was even featured in "Newsweek," which published an account of its activities. Dolci recounts his experience in Reggio, speaking of the workshops with the children, for whom he reserved the first stage for "theatrical scribbles," which consisted of conveying a mood, a sensation, a change of voice—an inescapable aspect that only someone of his sensitivity could perceive and appreciate: "The child is not an artist perfecting his language; the child has an urge to express himself. [...] Children use everything, disguises, masks... the fact that they dress up in their parents' clothes is documented over the centuries, in literature, painting, and is a natural, universal, and irrepressible impulse; that's where the mask comes from. [...] Furthermore, with children, the actor-spectator distinction disappears." In this dimension of imagination and creativity, Gianni Rodari, who came to Reggio Emilia for a seminar, emerged. Using his notes, he wrote The Grammar of Fantasy , in which he cited Mariano Dolci himself, who, together with the teachers, "drew stories for the children." Thanks to these methods, in the following years, Dolci worked in twenty kindergartens, thirteen nurseries, and later in various primary and then middle schools. Conferences and symposia followed, attended by psychologist Bruner and Dario Fo, along with Franca Rame, who came from a family of puppeteers. Theater was born from children's games, Dario Fo said, adding that those performances should have involved actors, not educators.

The question of language thus erupted even more forcefully, because theater is a dynamic space where multi-coded language is necessary and, I would add, vital, from which humanity developed and within which everything resides. This is an absolutely indissoluble concept that still fulfills its regenerative and, I would say, self-productive role today, given that language and the word are in constant transformation, endemic mutations that make it a different and more productive art than other forms of art. Indeed, what would poetic and theatrical texts endure if not in this awareness of the self-production/mutation of language as an endemic process? For Dolci, it was necessary to escape logic, as was the case in the psychiatric hospital where it was necessary to "bring the patients to reason... No, I want to bring them to fantasy, which is the same thing."

There are many paths to explore in the work of this colossus of Italian theater, literature, and poetry, who influenced generations of artists and intellectuals around the world. Research into his languages ​​and linguistic codes, in my opinion, would be not only appropriate, but necessary. However, we would like to remember him in one of the many interviews in which he spoke of his anarchist nature, given to Franco Bertolucci . When asked about his anarchist identity, Dolci replied: "Don't ask me difficult questions." Mariano, in fact, emphasized the enormous responsibility of defining himself as such and, above all, emphasized the modesty he felt in answering. The crux of the matter—and how could one disagree with him?—was the coherence of being an anarchist, and the difficulty of being one in a society now rooted in globalization and interconnection. A responsibility so profound that it led him to assert that if the values ​​of anarchism had not been transmitted, it was his own fault and not that of other factors, in the knowledge that since it is not possible to destroy a state entity, it is possible to circumvent it through "intelligent and understandable civil disobedience inspired by the values ​​of solidarity and equality."

Education remains powerful, though only public education could perhaps still consolidate the so-called "definitive" conquests. The image is and remains that of the child, who must be credited with the ability to build himself autonomously, working until the consecration of personal choices: "The child is not born good, as Rousseau says and as many of his companions believed, but he is certainly educable. He does not need ideas to be educated by, but an objective environment in which to be educated; an environment of solidarity, equality, respect. But perhaps, according to more and more experts, there is no longer time to see these transformations, since the agony of our planet is becoming irreversible. Do you know how they say Sandrone, the popular Emilian character, died? It's a metaphor for our time: he died by sawing off the wrong side of the tree branch he was sitting on." 3

Mariano Dolci's teaching moves me and inspires me to undertake the most important and demanding task I can ask of myself and my students: to be, without rhetoric or shortcuts, a very humane conveyor of values ​​to my students, for whom today's times seem to have mercilessly lowered the curtain.

NOTES

1 Clemente Bicocchi, Bread and Anti-Fascism. Interview / Story by Mariano Dolci, puppeteer , in «Il de Martino. Stories, voices, sounds», 2023, no. 36.

2 The “anarchist” puppeteer , interview by Franco Bertolucci with Mariano Dolci, in «A-Rivista Anarchica», XLIX (October 2019), n. 437.

3 Ibid.

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