Testori nella Milano di Mario Apollonio e Paolo Grassi. Il teatro e la mitopoiesi di una discussione di laurea

The contribution investigates Giovanni Testori's formative years at the Università Cattolica and his collaborative relationship with Mario Apollonio and Paolo Grassi. The different threads of Testori's commitment to a Christian theatre are reconstructed, and his work at the Teatro della Basilica, in his activity as critic and reviewer of theatre performances and in the unrealised project of a university theatre in Milan. The 1940s were for Testori also in the theatre years of an arduous search for an identity. Analysing the documents in the Cattolica University Archives, the famous autobiographical account of the thesis accused of heresy and of the repetition of the thesis discussion is definitively recognised as mythopoeic; the account does not correspond to the facts but is the (late) invention of a founding event of his identity as a heterodox and scandalous provocateur that he had built up over the years and that effectively distinguished him at the chronological height in which he bequeathed this account, identified by looking back to recount the past with the hindsight and identity of later