Search

Certainly – said Valditara – the percentage of foreign students in the schools of Monfalcone and in some areas of Friuli Venezia Giulia is very high, but it is not true that we deport students. This is a colossal fake news, it is not true that we split classes, because it refers to new arrivals during the school year. The principals have told me that there are many new enrollments during the year who do not know our language. “Certainly – said Valditara – the percentage of foreign students in the schools of Monfalcone and in some areas of Friuli Venezia Giulia is very high, but it is not true that we deport students. This is a colossal fake news, it is not true that we split classes, because it refers to new arrivals during the school year. The principals have told me that there are many new enrollments during the year who do not know our language.” #Scuola #Integrazione #AlunniStranieri (translated)

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

Lola described the ballet rehearsals at GF Vip as chaotic: Carmen was yelling at Valeria to practice, while Valeria seemed more interested in kissing than the choreography. Andreas was cursing under his breath, Giacomo was struggling with weights, and Marina was urinating. According to Lola, the choreography changed every two seconds; she called the scene "the mess we deserve." #gfvip #gfvip #realityshow #balletto (translated)

Swaffle wrote that the club had faked the player's injury and had kept him for three weeks in Trigoria instead of going to the national team. He added that later the footballer had broken a leg of a Como player, receiving a two-match ban. https://t.co/YsH4Lrt37V #calcio #infortunio #squalifica (translated)

Jan Molski criticized the response to the threat of an attack. He wrote that the authorities were supposed to receive information about the threat at 7:00, while at 8:00 Donald Tusk was walking with the media outside the KPRM. According to Molski, at 8:30 Tusk started a meeting with ministers, while the meeting of the services regarding the threat did not begin until 11:00. He added that after it ended, the participants left, knowing basically nothing. https://t.co/8H5PxLAJdo #polityka #bezpieczeństwo #aktualności (translated)

The author asked whether Prime Minister Donald Tusk, after 8 AM when he received threats via email regarding an assassination on his life, was walking down Belwederska Street from the villa on Parkowa to the Chancellery of the Prime Minister. He wondered whether it was a real threat of an assassination or a political "setup," and he wrote that similar questions were beginning to arise among... #DonaldTusk #Polska #Polityka #PL (translated)

Radosław Fogiel wrote that the person who received a threatening email at 7:00 calmly went for a walk at 8:00, not yet knowing that at 11:00 they would activate the state apparatus to stage a political spectacle. https://t.co/83eMfr9r5q #Polska #Bezpieczeństwo #SytuacjaSpołeczna (translated)

"They came within tens to hundreds of meters of our satellites, far too close to be reassured." SpaceX has recently seen "many examples" of satellites that came dangerously close to those of the company, executive Michael Nicolls told the International Astronautical Congress that took place in Turkey until Friday. #SpaceX #satellieten #ruimtevaart (translated)

SpaceX warns of the increasing risks in outer space and urges other companies to be more transparent about their satellite movements to prevent cosmic collisions, as the number of satellites in orbit around the Earth significantly increases. #SpaceX #satellieten #ruimtevaart (translated)

Pan Diabeł Stockton wrote that during the election campaign, Karol Nawrocki explained the matter of taking over the apartment as selfless help for a family friend, Jerzy Żywicki, whom he portrayed as a hero of the Gdańsk Solidarity opposition. The author announced that he would return to the matter of the apartment takeover another time, and then asked Marta Nawrocka whether, by signing the lifelong care agreement in exchange for the apartment, she was aware of Żywicki's past. He claimed that Żywicki was not a hero of the Tri-City Solidarity but a sex offender and described an incident in which he allegedly attacked a woman walking with a child in the park, tried to rape her, threatened her with death, and masturbated in front of her. #Polityka #Solidarność #Wybory (translated)

Will Bruey, co-founder and CEO of Varda Space Industries, leads an innovative company valued at $1.6 billion that seeks to manufacture pharmaceuticals in orbit, taking advantage of the benefits of microgravity to improve drug crystallization. #VardaSpace #InnovaciónEspacial #FarmacéuticaOrbital (translated)

Felipe Leme announced that he would open a patriotic space at 10:22 PM to individually thank participants and read all the messages received. He said he would leave a recording available and invited interested parties to participate. #SpacePatriota #Agradecimento #Comunidade (translated)

It is urgent to sit around a table and have a serious discussion; in a couple of weeks, it will be closed. From the same stage, Conte makes an appeal to define the program of the future coalition, particularly divided on the issue of arms to Ukraine. #Politica #Primarie #Progressisti (translated)

Furkan Yildirim wrote that the US Treasury could auction fewer long-term government bonds as early as November and possibly discontinue the 20-year term altogether. According to Yildirim, Citigroup expects Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent to announce a $3 billion reduction in auctions for 20- and 30-year bonds each on November 4. The financing gap is to be closed with government securities maturing within a year at the latest. The department may also ask large banks next week whether pension funds now prefer bonds from Amazon, Meta, and Alphabet to those of the state. The 20-year bond was reintroduced in 2020 after a 34-year hiatus and now offers nearly 5.7 percent interest, more than any other US maturity. At the end of 2020, its yield was just under 1.5 percent. At the same time, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Oracle, and SpaceX had already issued dollar bonds amounting to more than $180 billion in 2026; according to Yildirim, Amazon's bonds extend to 2076. According to asset manager TwentyFour, which Yildirim cited, Japanese investors are now receiving enough interest at home to invest their money there. Citi strategist Jason Williams wrote that pension funds may currently be more inclined than usual to invest in long-term corporate bonds of good quality. However, BNP Paribas strategists doubted that smaller auctions would reduce the government's financing costs. Yildirim also pointed out that the yield on 10-year US bonds serves as a basis for mortgages and many other loans, and Bessent had referred to it as an important measure of his success. With an annual deficit of nearly $2 trillion, the debt burden continues to grow as competition for long-term buyers increases. #Finanzen #Anleihen #Wirtschaft (translated)

SpaceX has acquired licenses for low-band frequencies in order to launch Starlink Mobile as a telecommunications operator in the United States, aiming to compete with major industry names such as T-Mobile and Verizon, and improving coverage in indoor environments. #SpaceX #Starlink #telecomunicazioni (translated)