NARCISSUS CIRCAEVS OR THE TRAGIC IN IL COMPLEANNO BY MARCO FILIBERTI

Abstract

Matteo & Francesca and Shay & Diego are two friend couples, in their forties, who decide to spend a summer together, in a beach house at the foot of Mount Circeo, in Italy. The second couple has a son, David, who has returned from the United States to celebrate his birthday with family. When he arrives, the young David faces two relationships in crisis: one worn by the physical separation of the spouses, the other by the routine of the couple. But it’s Matteo, David´s parents friend, who enters an internal dilemma that affects their emotional stability and that throws him into the domain of the taboo at various levels. Matteo feels deeply attracted by the young David, who, however, seems to oscillate between the obsession with himself and the attention that the older man dedicates to him. Matteo must decide whether he yields to temptation or resists it. The fact is that, yielding to the passio, he will have to deal with the consequences of his decision, which will cause all characters getting into a spiral of tragedy with euripidean and senequian features, in which there is no lack of many other echoes of our classical heritage. It is precisely these features that this paper aims to analyze.