As Light as a Whale: Roberto Abbiati’s Una tazza di mare in tempesta and the Presence of Moby-Dick in Contemporary Italian Arts

Ever since Cesare Pavese’s pioneering 1932 translation of Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, Italy has proven particularly receptive to Herman Melville’s masterpiece, which has not only been enthusiastically loved by generations of readers and stimulated the interest and acumen of local Americanists, but has also inspired an extensive number of Italian writers and artists. The first part of this article sketches a provisional map of some of the most recent examples of Moby-Dick’s reception in the Italian arts. These range from Simona Mulazzani’s dreamy etchings of tatooed whales and Giovanni Robustelli’s delicate watercolors to Sara Filippi Plotegher’s environmentally-inspired illustrations and designer Matteo Ugolini’s Moby-Dick lamps. These works shed light on some of the meanings typically associated with Melville’s work and how they have changed over the last two decades. In particular, I intend to show how the understanding of Melville’s work has recently shifted from the somber and grave tone of early twentieth-century interpretations and rewritings – when it was all about tragedy, darkness, sacrifice, and folly – to the lighter tone of more recent admirers. Building on this shift, this essay investigates one of the most successful recent transmedial adaptations of Moby-Dick: Roberto Abbiati’s play Una tazza di mare in tempesta (A Sea Storm in a Teacup). This adaptation distills Moby-Dick into a seventeen-minute show performed for a very small audience within a wooden box that simulates the hold of a tiny ship. In fact, Abbiati manages to evoke the whole drama by using figurines and found objects, as well as by selecting with scalpel-like precision key passages from the novel. Abbiati has also published a beautiful and singular graphic novel adaptation of Moby-Dick, summarizing each chapter of the book with only one drawing. Abbiati’s works are evidence of the enduring vitality of Melville’s presence in contemporary Italian art and offer the opportunity to appreciate the lighter dimensions of Moby-Dick.