ABSTRACT
The mise en espace of Elsa Morante's Aracoeli was staged in Berlin, in German. Hence the inclusion of Spanish songs underlined the otherness of the character Aracoeli, even more so than it would have if the performance had been in Italian. However, passion dominates in Aracoeli, in its profane sense too: erotic suffering, with all the weight of the grandiosity, aggressiveness, and destruction that it brings with it. Aracoeli suffers in her body of love, is hurt in that body, in that flesh which harbours desire and the conception of life. Aracoeli is a text in which meanings are dramatically overturned. Morante magnifies maternity and the carnal union of mother and child, and then deftly destroys it. Lisa Nathan was called upon to give life to the shadow of Aracoeli, to her past, to the world of visions/hallucinations which her son describes in the novel.
