Ninnoli

In the tangled streets of pre‑unification Italy a self‑styled duellist named Domenico Ghegola fills his modest home with swords, pistols and countless pamphlets on chivalry. Obsessed with the romance of battle, he spends his days practising thrusts on a leather cushion and polishing the brass of imagined trophies, while loudly proclaiming that true courage is the fear of fear itself. Yet despite his grand speeches about joining Garibaldi’s ranks, the war of ’59 passes him by as he remains stubbornly rooted on the shore of the Garda.

Exiled in the bustling cafés of Brescia, Ghegola trades his solitary armory for lively debates with officers, theater outings, and endless prescriptions of political theory. He flirts with the idea of enlisting, juggling dreams of cavalry glory against a deep‑seated contempt for monarchs and a talent for spectacular procrastination. Listeners are invited to watch his spectacularly comic struggle between bold rhetoric and idle action, wondering whether the man of many weapons will ever draw a real one.