A brief personal aside: when I began to tell that story 30 years ago I was filled with great anger at oblivion. First of all, I was angry with myself: how could I have grown up ignoring that history, dismissing the disaster as the work of Nature? There was rebellion at the base of the gesture of narrating the Vajont, and a desire for compensation and justice. During the performance it was difficult to keep the emotion at bay with the craft. Some of this also arrived via television with the live broadcast of 9 October 1997. Thirty-four years had passed since the disaster. Now, there are sixty.

What has changed? We are not the same. A generation has passed, but it's not just a question of age. A few years ago I began to study reports on the climate, to read the books of those who try to narrate what we are experiencing, to measure the strategies of denialism first and then of populism in riding the clichés that contrast the scientific picture, justifying a widespread inertia to the ecological transition. I myself feel annoyed using words like these because they are heartless, without feeling.

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Searching for better words to talk about the water crisis, about the objectives of the United Nations Agenda 30, I found myself faced with that story: the story of Vajont.

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In January I studied it again and from February onwards I began to tell it clandestinely, by appointment. In short, I tested it on hundreds of spectators of different ages, from different cities, from Palermo to Verona, from Milan to Naples. As I told the story, I understood that the same story today talks about us and not about them. That ours is the fear, the rebellion.

We are not talking about what happened sixty years ago, but what could happen to us on a different scale, in a much shorter time. It tells of how the signals were ignored or underestimated, as in the most classic tragedies.