Gustavo Modena. Tra Teatro Educatore e teatro Nazionale

[Autom. eng. transl.] The essay highlights the importance of Gustavo Modena's theatrical reform - embodied both in the practice of actor and actor-manager, and in the reflection of an artist writing on his own art - with respect to the formation of an Italian national theater. Modena, one of the major actors of the first half of the nineteenth century, violently threw himself against contemporary theater, worldly entertainment and simple distraction from daily chores, considering it necessary for the art of the scene to be renewed as «theater educator». The actor entrusted to the theater a sense and a strong value within the society: it should have fulfilled an ethical, moral and cultural function; to be art meant precisely, for Modena, to be able to elevate the soul of men.