Taranto and the story of its Moby Dick: "Ninì and the Whale" inaugurates the 17th edition of "Favole&Tamburi"

Taranto had its Moby Dick: a large cetacean that frightened the entire city in 1887. That story now returns to the theater with "Ninì and the Whale," a new show by Crest that opens tomorrow, Sunday, November 9th, with a double performance at 6:00 PM and 8:30 PM, the seventeenth edition of "Favole&TAmburi" at TaTÀ, a festival supported by the Puglia Region.

The work is a collaboration between the Taranto-based company and Michelangelo Campanale, a leading director and playwright of the new-generation theater movement, who shares the script and direction with Antonella Ruggiero. On stage are Giovanni Guarino, one of the founders of Crest, and the young performer Andrea Romanazzi. "Ninì and the Whale" is a poetic and visual tale that interweaves acting, puppetry, and shadow theater, with the collaboration of Raffaele Scarimboli and Marco Guarrera. The story is inspired by a true event: the appearance in February 1887, in the Gulf of Taranto, of a Northern Right Whale, the first ever sighted in the Mediterranean. Feared and misunderstood, the creature was struck by harpoon guns and even dynamite. Its remains are now at the Zoological Museum of Naples, a reminder of a forgotten event. As in Sepúlveda's novel "The Story of a Whale Told by Herself," the show invites us to "look at the world through the animal's eyes," delicately addressing fear, memory, and transformation. Guarino plays Ninì, the fisherman who, as a child, first sighted the whale: an act born of fear that will forever mark his life.