The most innovative TV action was broadcast on Rai5: “Raffa in the Sky”, an opera by Lamberto Curtoni directed by Francesco Micheli, with a libretto by Renata Ciaravino and Alberto Mattioli (Rai Cultura). An opera about Raffaella Carrà? Yes, a strange mix between opera and pop, between opera and musical (a young actress, Chiara Dello Iacovo, was chosen for the role of Raffaella), between television history and fantasy. We can only hope that RaiPlay will keep it on the bill for a long time.
Raffaella Carrà is an ambassador of peace and love from the planet Arkadia, the kingdom of beauty and poetry where King Apollo XI. reigns over the chosen spirits of art. She is sent to earth to “disorder Italy”, represented in particular by an “average family” who does not experience the fears and the first glories of the economic boom (television, washing machine…) and the tribulations of psychology no longer have to think about survival.
“The stage of the mission is now called television”: The work is not a biography of Raffaella (even though it begins in 1943, the year Pelloni was born), but rather attempts to portray the effect that her phantom apparition had on the audience. The eternal half-four, saint and dancer, helper and heartthrob, platinum and lacquer, after her death half of Italy discovered themselves as queer in mourning clothes.
With her, sexual transgression became parental: the “Tuca-Tuca” (“Canzonissima ’71”) was the discovery of the navel in the social history of Italy; Stimulus of a sexually intimate nature, which, protected by the senses, can only trigger tentative vibrations.
“Raffa in the Sky” offers itself as a hymn to the beauty, harmony and thaumaturgic powers of art, but is also a story of how television changed the country, from Carosello to the advent of commercial television ( that’s what it’s called too). (which applies to Berlusconi) or how things could have changed if Raffa’s word had been received in more than a superficial way.
Raffa is the symbol of our “emotional community” and the work dedicated to her is an important chapter in popular culture.