Description
It is June 8, 1953, and the transatlantic ship Homeland has just crossed the Strait of Gibraltar, reaching the point in the Mediterranean that corresponds to the coordinates latitude 37’ 21’ North, longitude 4’ 30’ East, the same that will be recorded on the death certificate of its most famous passenger on board, Griselda Andreatini, known to all who loved her voice across the ocean simply as Lady Gilda, the Mignonette. Almost seventy, worn out by alcohol and jealousy, Lady Gilda makes her last journey to Naples, a city she has sung about for half a century and that has made her the “queen of emigrants.” Watching over her is Esterina Malacarne, known to all simply as the guagliona, the assistant with white hair and a child’s body that Gilda brought with her from Italy, a girl from the working-class neighborhoods but educated, who has always acted as her interpreter due to a father who was a doorman at the American consulate. While Gilda sleeps in her final bed, the guagliona ties together the threads of their shared past, the arrival at Ellis Island, the life of luxury and theaters in New York, the meeting with Federico García Lorca, her dramatic attempted suicide, and the correspondence between the poet and the singer, but above all the love and betrayal of Esterina with the only man she should never have desired. Against the backdrop of sparkling New York from the roaring twenties and World War II, in La notte non vuole venire Alessio Arena sings with poignant nostalgia about prohibition, Italian-American gangsters, fame, passions, and the disappointments of Gilda Mignonette, the greatest Italian singer in America.
