Il fu Mattia Pascal di Luigi Pirandello | Impara l'italiano con la letteratura

Il fu Mattia Pascal: Luigi Pirandello's most popular work. Let's find out what it's about, let's go thorugh the plot of this work together. If you have not yet seen the video about Luigi Pirandello's life and works, you can find it up here and also in the description.

It is a very, very interesting video that will help you understand who this great character of Italian fiction and theatrical production of the twentieth century is. Let's now talk about this work: Il fu Mattia Pascal. The main carachter of this story is obviously Mattia Pascal and the story begins inside a library in an imaginary city in Liguria, Miragno.

In the first scene, Mattia Pascal starts telling his story. Mattia Pascal comes from a very wealthy family, very wealthy, but after his father died the family makes a wrong choice and entrust all their properties to a not very honest administrator , a certain Batta Malagna. This administrator decides to pay all his debts by selling the Pascal family's properties, ruining them.

Matia Pascal is forced to find a job to financially support the family and begins to work in a library. In the meantime he marries Romilda Pescatore and they go to live together and also his mother-in-law, Romilda's mother, stays with them. Life at home is a nightmare for Mattia Pascal and he describes the family as a trap, a trap in which he has to wear masks to adapt to this situation.

The role of the masks and the trap, typical of Pirandello's works, therefore return. Tired of this life and this family situation, Mattia Pascal decides to leave, he takes a train to France from where he would have embarked for America, but when he arrives on the Côte d'Azur he decides to go the Monte Carlo casino. He spends a few days in this city and, luckily, he wins a large sum of money, he becomes.

At this point, with this large sum of money, Mattia Pascal decides to go home and thinks about how to change his life. But the Universe (or destiny) does the work for him: while he is on the train to go back home, Mattia Pascal finds his obituary in the newspaper. There is an announcement in which they communicate that Mattia Pascal is dead.

A body was found in his city and his wife and mother-in-law recognized it, they attributed the body to Mattia Pascal. At this point Mattia Pascal was dead for the law . He is initially upset, but something lights up, a light bulb goes on and that is the perfect opportunity to escape.

Why go to America when you are dead and then you can build your life again? He decides to change his name to Adriano Meis, throws away his wedding ring, got a squint surgery done, changes his hairstyle, cuts his beard: he is a new person, with a new life and a new name . He even rethinks and reconstructs an imaginary past, because he must answer the questions that the people he meets ask him.

He then decides to move to Rome, where he falls in love with Adriana, but Adriano Meis, who is the new name of the character, realizes that it is difficult to carry on this staging. He has escaped from the social masks of his city and his family, but he's wearing another one. He has to invent stories about his past, he has to invent an identity and therefore it is difficult to keep this role in front of people's questions about his past.

He is always under pressure to devise and find invented answers to these questions. During the story, Adriano Meis falls in love with this girl, Adriana, and kisses her during a séance. He would like to marry her, but he cannot as Adriano Meis does not exist according to the law: he is a dead man who lives or he is living man who is dead.

Not being able to manage this situation anymore, he decides to fake a suicide, so he pretends to die: Mattia Pascal died and Adriano Meis died too. He was dead for everyone. Without an identity and not knowing what to do, he decides to return to his village in Liguria, where he finds his wife Romilda married to Pomino, with whom he also had a daughter.

He walks around the village, but no one notices him, after all, no one knew Adriano Meis; everyone knew Mattia Pascal, but Mattia Pascal had been dead for a long time. Every so often he goes to the cemetery to leave some flowers in front of his grave and this is the story of a person who died twice and never found his identity again. Again in this work we find precisely those fundamental elements of Luigi Pirandello's literary production : the escape from a reality, loneliness, the tragic vision of life, the trap, the mask and even madness and paradox, because some situations are truly paradoxical - a person who is alive but is dead, who still dies but is actually still alive.

They are extraordinary weaves that demonstrate the art and genius of Luigi Pirandello. I hope you liked this story, or maybe you have already read Mattia Pascal or you knew this story before. Let me know in the comments below.

On the Patreon page you will find the transcript of this video and the link is below in description. We will soon talk about another work by Luigi Pirandello, so that's not all. Soon!