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LETTERE MERIDIANE — “TEATRO-EDICOLA” OF SAN SEVERO CONQUERS THE WORLD SOURCE: https://www.letteremeridiane.org/2026/10/il-teatro-edicola-di-san-severo-conquista-il-mondo/?fbclid=IwY2xjawU4oqFleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBwZG9mAXNydGMGYXBwX2lkEDIyMjAzOTE3ODgyMDA4OTIAAR5rVEwYs6UUXg7v-P0SyIQ_DRb_F6ZiY58OcseYoV4J7atcTiERnhWaqKM2pw_aem_Njle1jq1XLzHr93KLBUcVA After “Broadway World”, the “Los Angeles Journal”, “The Psychologist (British Psychological Association)” and Hollywood Beat Magazine, its “academic consecration” has now arrived courtesy of Stanford University. As I have already emphasised in my article on the revival of the GIO Festival in Foggia, celebrated by BroadwayWorld for the world stage premiere of the Giordano’s opera Marina (1888), the province of Foggia has long ceased to be peripheral. It happens when it finds an idea that shifts the coordinates: well, in San Severo, 40 kilometres from Foggia, it has happened again. Only this time an orchestra was not needed; six chairs were enough. The celebrated Teatro-Edicola of San Severo artistic director Francesco Gravino of the theatre company Foyer ’97 has been featured in the academic journal “Stanford Social Innovation Review (SSIR)” as an academic case study. The news, relayed on 19 September 2026 by ANSA Nazionale, looked like a misprint. Then it became clear that it was not. SSIR, an award-winning publication covering multisectoral solutions to global problems, included the project in its Dispatches section with the reportage “The Six-Seat Revolution”. It is the inverse trajectory to that of the GIO Festival: not a forgotten opera returning to a grand historic Italian horseshoe theatre, but an entire theatre reborn inside a disused place, forgotten by man. There are moments when past and future intertwine to create something visionary, innovative, artistically “revolutionary”: San Severo experienced one of those moments on the morning of 27 March 2026, during World Theatre Day, when the shutter of a newsstand closed for six years in Via Matteo Tondi was reopened “not to sell newspapers, but to offer stirring stories”, to quote Gravino’s motto. The idea of the visionary Francesco Gravino, artistic director, stage director and actor of the San Severo company Foyer ’97, active for at least 30 years in Capitanata, centred on the kiosk, hexagonal in metal and glass, granted free of charge by its owner Pino Frau, by now an urban relic created by the publishing crisis of the early 2000s: today in Italy active newsstands have fallen from about 35,000 in 2005 to about 20,000 in 2024, a decline of 42.8%. Gravino and eleven other actors restructured it in two weeks of work, without institutional funding, and transformed it into what is now under examination by the London commission of Guinness World Records as the “world’s smallest theatre”. The formula is deliberately austere: six spectators at a time outside, actors inside at less than a metre’s distance, 15-minute performances, continuous rotation from 11:00 to 20:45, texts ranging from Goldoni to Chekhov, from Ibsen to Dacia Maraini. On the door a QR code with an original theatrical warning: “Warning! This QR code transforms passers-by into actors. Scan only if ready.” The numbers immediately showed that it was no boutade: more than 60 people in a single afternoon, three inaugural days that sold out. But above all a positive echo that went beyond the borders of San Severo. “Broadway World” (just as in the previous case of the GIO Festival), the world’s most influential theatre criticism outlet with over 5.5 million monthly views, devoted exclusive coverage to it on 27 April 2026: “An Abandoned Italian Newsstand Just Became the World’s Smallest Theatre”. Not a mere listing, but an analysis: “There is no foyer, there is no balcony, there is no grid. There is barely a wing. What there is is something almost unrecognisable as an evening at the theatre, and for that very reason it is all the more powerful.” “Broadway World” captured Gravino’s manifesto idea: “This is a theatre of proximity. In an era of digital distance, we are putting human contact back at the centre,” framing it as “More than a clever exercise in site-specific theatre. It is a reappropriation.” All of this, in a Mezzogiorno of Italy often narrated only in terms of organised crime and marginalisation. To that seal of approval was added another, even more disorienting for a newsstand in San Severo: the “Los Angeles Journal”, one of the most influential publications on the West Coast for the performing arts. On 12 May 2026, it headlined thus: “San Severo’s Teatro-Edicola as an Innovative Model for Los Angeles Theaters?” opening as follows: “In a city in southern Italy that Hollywood has never heard of, a theatre director has just built the smallest stage in the world: six seats, fifteen minutes, zero distance. Los Angeles should pay attention.” The “Los Angeles Journal” does not indulge in folklore, but places the kiosk in Via Matteo Tondi alongside the prestigious 1,600-seat Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles, the Pantages of Broadway in Hollywood, the 99-seat plan of Rogue Machine, the Odyssey, the Victory Theatre and the Hollywood Fringe. It even recalls Ethan Marks’s Electrical Box Theatre, a veritable electrical box lined with red velvet in downtown Los Angeles, to argue that Gravino has taken to the extreme the question Los Angeles has been asking itself for decades: How small can a stage become before it ceases to be a stage? And it recognizes the San Severo urban model: almost zero cost, two weeks of work and six chairs, in return for immediate provincial, regional and national media coverage, recognition by the San Severo’s Municipal Administration, and a format exportable anywhere. Then, the third American piece came from “Hollywood Beat Magazine” on 20 April 2026: Six seats. Fifteen minutes. One actor. No stage. The magazine recounts the kiosk in Via Tondi left disused for almost six years, the contemporary six-seat cultural outpost, placing Francesco Gravino in a distinguished genealogy: Richard Schechner and environmental theatre, Jerzy Grotowski and poor theatre, Nicolas Bourriaud and relational aesthetics. But it closes with pragmatism: it is not a thesis, it is fixing a street corner, that is, repairing an urban street corner by asking not how large a theatre can become, but how small it must become again to recover its original power. And finally, the celebrated London-based “The Psychologist”, the journal of the “British Psychological Society (BPS)”, the oldest psychological society in the world, transformed the Teatro-Edicola into a scientific case study: on 30 July 2026 it published “The world’s smallest theatre — and Psychologists’ next act”, starting from the same detail, the morning of 27 March when the metal shutter of the hexagonal kiosk in Via Tondi reopened after six years, six people inside, an actor at less than a metre’s distance beginning Chekhov. It describes the formula: six spectators, 15 minutes, 11 actors over 10 hours, from Goldoni to Euripides, inside a kiosk where the fourth wall does not break because architecturally it never existed. But the BPS goes a step further: it cites the 2025 studies by Damien Gabriel in IBRO Neuroscience Reports, that live performance generates measurably stronger emotional and physiological activation than video, and introduces Edward Hall’s proxemics: below one metre is intimate space, reserved for doctors, close friends, lovers. In that one-square-metre space, the actor’s breath is audible, micro-expressions legible, the self-other boundary becomes permeable. The Teatro-Edicola “does not make theatre better, it makes it inevitable”. And it is here that one understands why Stanford is studying it as an academic case study in social innovation, not as a case of artistic originality. In Italy, meanwhile, the national media circuit had already picked up the phenomenon: RaiNews — TG2 Storie brought it to RaiDue at midnight on 19 April. RTL 102.5 devoted space to the format conceived by Gravino and developed by Foyer ’97 in the heart of San Severo in Via Tondi, defining it as a permanent micro-stage capable of bringing theatre into public space. ANSA.it, Gazzetta del Mezzogiorno, La Repubblica, TG2000, Radio Capital, Swiss RSI, ANSA Brazil and many others followed. And for the record: Fiorello praised it in La Pennicanza as an artistic case inspired by his Edicola Fiore, and Biagio Antonacci, on his tour in the Augustan amphitheatre of Lucera, made a “fact-finding” stop at the Teatro-Edicola singing the celebrated and nostalgic Iris in front of an audience certainly larger than the “six seats”. Francesco Gravino’s theatre company Foyer ’97 was not born yesterday: behind it lie the Teatro-Cantina of 2016, the underground theatre, and in 2011 a performance on the bell tower of a church in the centre of San Severo at 45 metres high. The Teatro-Edicola completes, in Gravino’s words, “the entire vertical extension of theatre: underground, street level, rooftop”. And it is preparing for its thirtieth anniversary in 2027 aiming to purchase the kiosk to make it permanent, exporting the “San Severo Model” to Rome, Lucca, and to the festivals of Santarcangelo and Todi. As with the GIO Festival, someone might dare to claim that it is merely a stunt, but when BroadwayWorld places you alongside the Los Angeles Opera House, the “Los Angeles Journa”l proposes you as a model for Hollywood, “Hollywood Beat Magazine” reads you through Grotowski and the “British Psychological Society” uses you to explain mirror neurones, it is no longer a stunt but an excellent artistic and academic positioning. To those who still whisper that Foggia and Capitanata are provincial, the answer is now written on two opposite and complementary fronts: on 5 June in Foggia a 138-year-old opera found the stage again at the Giordano ending up on BroadwayWorld; on 27 March in San Severo a 4-square-metre kiosk invented a stage that did not exist, ending up at Stanford, in Los Angeles, in Hollywood and in London. The periphery, when it has a precise idea, becomes the centre. Even with six chairs. Luciano Magaldi Sardella

Nicolas Redondo Terreros questioned the actions of the members of the Constitutional Court in the approval of the amnesty and argued that they had favored Pedro Sánchez and Carles Puigdemont. He claimed that the measure had served to secure the seven independentist votes necessary for Sánchez to remain in La Moncloa and rejected that its purpose had been to pacify Catalan society or facilitate political agreements. The author said that if the Supreme Court ruled against it, the Constitutional Court would still have to pronounce on the so-called "grandchildren's law." He also maintained that the magistrates had lost prestige and had acted in the service of a leader who, according to him, lacked scruples and threatened democratic balances. Redondo Terreros responded to Cándido Conde-Pumpido's assertion that going against the Constitutional Court was going against democracy. In his view, criticizing the court's management and its intervention in the Supreme Court's realm was also a way to defend it. #Constitución #Democracia #Justicia (translated)

Madrid is losing prestige and legitimacy. They tried to condemn us before judging us, and it is being proven that there was nothing behind the accusations against us. You go to the institutions, you go to UEFA, you go to the EuroLeague, and they are against everything and everyone. The other day I was at the Congress, at the General Assembly of the European Football Clubs, and they didn't even have representation. It says a lot about the attitude of a club that is losing prestige, recognition, and credibility at the national, state, and international levels. It's evidence. They opt for a very arrogant, very haughty attitude. They know what they're doing. They should engage in self-criticism. In my opinion, he had a great season. Furthermore, he has won very important titles like the League and the World Cup. He is a very sincere, very direct, and very young guy. The truth is that Lamine is enthusiastic, and I understand that sometimes he expresses himself this way. In fact, there is a sort of competition. Perhaps before, with Messi and Cristiano, this didn't happen as much. For me, there was always uncertainty, although Messi had to win because he was the best, but they didn't publicly position themselves. Now it's a different way of handling the matter, and I think it shouldn't be blown out of proportion; it's a very human reaction from a 19-year-old who is going to make history in football. We'll see how it goes because there is absolute secrecy involved. We all tried to talk to France Football, and there's no way for them to leak anything. He got injured, came back, and has recovered here. The doctors say he will be available for the match in Paris. These are situations we have to accept. We have a team that enchants by playing football from Madrid; they try to downplay all of this. #Laporta #FCBarcelona #BalónDeOro (translated)

Joan Laporta, president of FC Barcelona, said that Lamine Yamal deserves the Ballon d'Or for his outstanding season and titles won, while criticizing Real Madrid for their arrogant and haughty attitude which makes them lose prestige and credibility. #FCBarcelona #JoanLaporta #RealMadrid (translated)

Nayib Bukele stated that Latinobarómetro had maintained a hostile editorial line towards his government, although its measurements historically enjoyed prestige and, according to him, were based on data and not on ideological narratives. Bukele pointed out that El Salvador had ranked first in 19 of the 20 indicators of the survey for Latin America, related to security, trust in institutions, state efficiency, and public services. He added that, in the remaining indicator, the Presidency of the Republic was the institution that generated the most trust among Salvadorans, something that, he said, only happened in El Salvador. He ironically referred to those who labeled the country a dictatorship despite these results. #ElSalvador #ConfianzaInstitucional #SeguridadLatinoamericana (translated)

The author wrote that dialogues revealed in the Cornel rape case among men attending a prestigious university showed how, in their view, so-called elites were helping the manosphere grow. They also described the conversations as reflecting a broader societal shift, but the post ended before specifying its direction.

The author said conversations revealed in the Cornel rape case, involving men at a prestigious university, showed how so-called elites helped enable the rise of the manosphere. They described the case as reflecting a broader shift towards what they called “the thinly veiled”, but the post ended mid-sentence.

The Spanish Men's National Football Team reported that Pau Cubarsí, Marc Bernal, Jon Martín, and Xavi Espart were among the 25 finalists for the Golden Boy 2026 award, which, as stated, recognizes the best under-21 player in Europe. They also congratulated them. #VamosEspaña https://t.co/yhM8438yRQ #GoldenBoy #Fútbol #España (translated)

FELIX INTERNATIONAL said FELIX had attended a gathering at the Palais de l’Élysée honouring Louis Vuitton’s Nicolas Ghesquière, who received the Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur. The author said the guests included France’s first couple, Anna Wintour, Grace Coddington, Haider Ackermann and the Arnault family, as well as Hollywood actors, journalists and fashion executives. #Mode #Célébrités #Fashion (translated)