Il Milione quaderno veneziano, at Teatro Strehler

Forget the "postcard" Venice, romantic and full of tourists who throng the streets that Santa Lucia train station or Tronchetto parking leading to San Marco across the Rialto Bridge, and they don't realize the beauty and extraordinary authenticity of all other Districts. Venice, the city of Italy, most awkward "the only when you change channel without remote control", it's still, first and foremost, a city and its inhabitants for centuries defended with tooth and nail from the water, constructing their palaces on stilts, and living every day the inconvenience and the extraordinary beauty of the pedestrian historic centre "world's largest".

Almost 15 years since the first staging and live television broadcast by Rai2 in 1998, Marco Paolini riallestisce Il Milione Venetian book, dedicating it to the small theater and its audience, the actor says, "for years following me to every room crowding my show."

The Million is a blend of ancient and contemporary stories featuring a Mainland man, campaigns. Through his eyes and, especially, his stories, materialize on the canals and calli, junk shops, churches and museums crowded with tourists, but also the industrial suburbs: Mestre, Marghera and around the North East, a region that from the lagoon becomes the Mainland and that, beyond the Beltway and the "Maginot line" of the malls that separates Venice from the rest of the world, turns into a "land of cottages".

A lightweight tale and sometimes surreal that constructs a travel path (real and imaginary) in a complex and varied geography, explored with curious gaze and acute land man, who comes from a farming culture and observes, with a mixture of mistrust and astonishment, all contradictions and wonders of the world's weirdest cities: "a city without cantinas – comment – Campaigns is certainly the work of the devil".