The appointment with Telmo Pievani, following the presentation of his book at 6:00 PM (https://visitborghetto.it/eventi/telmo-pievani-presenta-uniti-per-la-vita-storie-di-simbiosi-e-cooperazione) returns at 9:30 PM with the Teatro nel Borgo festival, in the evocative setting of the historic Cinema Vittoria arena, with the show “Darwin’s Crime. Story of a Dreadful Secret”, written and performed by philosopher and evolutionist Telmo Pievani. The show tells the years in which Darwin, returning from his voyage on the Beagle, kept his revolutionary theory hidden for twenty years, torn between his discoveries and his fear of upsetting Victorian society.
There is a secret in the life of the greatest English naturalist. He was still a boy when he returned with the Beagle from his voyage around the world in 1836. An initiation among the oceans, a coming-of-age novel. In his head, many observations, many memories, visions, terrible seasickness and an idea that emerges, revolutionary. He writes it down in London in certain small notebooks and it grows, increasingly burdensome: the tree of life, or rather the coral; natural selection; we are all relatives, down to the humblest worm; no Providence has brought us here. A single great network binds all living things together. But how can he tell others? Another five-year journey, entirely mental this time, and by 1841 the notebooks are finished: the theory of evolution has been conceived. And so Charles Darwin makes his choice: he decides to keep his notes secret, even from his wife Emma, in a drawer, forever. He even packages them for a posthumous edition, adding a heartbreaking letter. He is afraid of the consequences, mind you not from the Church (he came from two secular and libertine families), but from society and his colleagues. They won’t take it well, the dethroning of man from the center of nature. No, they won’t take it well at all. Better to keep quiet, devote himself to other things, to geology, to barnacles. In contumacy. For twenty years two Darwins will exist: the public one, the darling of English science, and the private one, the materialist revolutionary, in his refuge in Kent. To a friend, in 1844, he will let slip a word and confess that he has committed a “crime”, an assassination to be precise, but he will not add further details. He knows that the hiding will not be able to last forever. Sooner or later he will be discovered. He vomits every morning. He begins to exchange letters with a naturalist younger than him, Alfred R. Wallace, lost among the spice islands, and understands with dismay that he has independently arrived at the same conclusions. Revelation at this point is inevitable and it will be a drama, not without comedy. The solemn announcement of Darwin and Wallace’s revolutionary theory, on July first 1858 at the Linnean Society, in the midst of London’s great stench, will receive no attention. He escapes to take spa treatments. When he is already 50 years old, in thirteen months he will write his masterpiece, The Origin of Species, but this is a story everyone knows. A breathtaking show about Darwin’s little-known history before he became Darwin, the sad icon with the long white beard we study in school. A portrait of Victorian England through the fears, the torments, the illuminations and the reluctances of an antihero, hypochondriac and mild. While locomotives clang, canals open, steam engines come to life, a lonely man understands the laws of evolution and is frightened. A parade of characters brushes past him, from Samuel Coleridge to Benjamin Franklin, from Alexander von Humboldt to Charles Dickens, from Thomas Malthus to Alfred Tennyson. A theatrical story unbeknownst to him, with plot twists and a tragicomic ending.
Telmo Pievani
Evolutionist, philosopher of science, Darwin historian, essayist, he teaches Philosophy of Biological Sciences in the Department of Biology at the University of Padova and is a visiting scientist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. From 2017 to 2019 he was President of the Italian Society of Evolutionary Biology.
Author of 375 publications, translated into many languages, his best-known books are: Darwin (Laterza, 2012); Imperfezione (Cortina, 2019); Finitudine (Cortina, 2020); Serendipità (Cortina, 2021); La natura è più grande di noi (Solferino, 2022); Tutti i mondi possibili (Cortina, 2024). Member of important scientific societies and the Editorial Board of international journals, he directs the Pikaia and Lucy sui Mondi portals. Winner of 17 awards, author of books for children on evolution, together with Banda Osiris, the “Deproducers” collective, Marco Paolini and Cristiano Godano, he is the creator of theatrical and musical projects on scientific themes.
From 2024 he brings to the stage “Nomadic – Canto per la biodiversità”, written and created together with Gianni Maroccolo, directed by Mariano De Tassis. He collaborates with Il Corriere della Sera and with the magazines Le Scienze and Micromega. He has curated and introduced several works and selections of letters by Charles Darwin, including the “Notebooks on Transmutation” (Laterza, 2008). In 2026 his author’s translation of The Origin of Species for Einaudi will be released.
The Teatro nel Borgo Festival returns on Friday July 24 at 9:30 PM with Oblivion, with the show “Oblivion Collection”.
The shows are free admission, subject to available seating. No reservation required.
