La Falena Magazine

Theatre criticism has always looked solemn, dense, academic — a language for the small world already inside it. We turned that over: something pop and visually loud, large format, flat vivid colour, sharp crops, without losing any authority in the writing. A magazine worth keeping, at home in a theatre foyer and at a festival full of twenty-year-olds.

The layout rests on a modular grid, strict but flexible, setting the rhythm across very different columns — theatre, cinema, literature — alongside features, criticism, diaries and interviews, alternating dense text with images and white space. Over the years I drew everything inside it: the column icons recur issue after issue like a visual alphabet, giving the magazine a continuity you catch at a glance.

I also drew the portraits of the figures of Italian theatre profiled across the issues — Emma Dante, Milena Vukotić, Mimmo Cuticchio, Enzo Moscato. With the editors I took the art director’s role as well, choosing issue by issue which illustrator or photographer to bring in: Davide Catania, Stefano Ricci, Enrico Fedrigoli, Maria Clara Macrì, Marco Smacchia, Michele Lapini and others. Many hands, one idea of what the magazine was.

Seven issues plus the pilot, five years of work, a visual coherence held from the first page to the last — serious without being solemn.

Thanks to Lorenzo, Maddalena, Rodolfo and Alessandro.