In October 2013, the S. Gregorio community of Faith and Light in Rome decided to stage Pinocchio. They extended an invitation to Nella and Daniele from the S. Silvia community, and so began an adventure that would eventually carry them all the way to Puglia. Rehearsals took place regularly on weekends, so everyone could balance their work and other commitments.
Each gathering unfolded in a spirit of joy. Despite occasional difficulties, everyone learned their lines and grew confident in their roles. Together they built the production piece by piece—sets, music, choreography, costumes—drawing in even the youngest members and caring for every detail.
By March 2014, after months of rehearsal, opening night arrived. Excitement crackled. They posted flyers, advertised on Facebook, called friends. The company's success was unmistakable. Word spread—all the way to Puglia.
"At the heart of a Faith and Light community are people living with intellectual disability, their parents and friends, bound together in an experience of encounter where these three groups forge bonds of faithful friendship." (Faith and Light Charter)
Friendship deepens when you make time to be together, united in activities that nourish that very bond. Through integrated theater, we lived out loyalty on and around a stage, alongside a puppet who struggled before learning what it meant to become human.
Loyalty to friendship—which Faith and Light, now forty years in Italy, has pursued for four decades by gathering around those most vulnerable among us, and around the vulnerability in all of us, no one excluded.
For many Saturday afternoons over tea and a light snack, Pinocchio became our companion. With help from determined friends and young people who believed in "playing things seriously," we chose theater—a form in which everyone could offer their essential gift, as equals. We read the puppet's story, cast roles, imagined costumes and sounds and lights, wrote a script. We rewrote it. And rewrote it again. Always searching for the right solution so that everyone—from five years old to seventy—could give their best and experience the magic of integrated theater.
But things grew more ambitious. While we had performed in parish halls and Faith and Light gatherings in Rome before, this time we dreamed bigger. "Together for Pinocchio" became a tour. We built the whale's iconic mouth, a fireplace, Pinocchio's bed, and more. We traveled to Puglia and were warmly welcomed by Don Vito Palmisano and the "Hand in Hand" community of Fasano at their parish theater. The idea had sprouted from a desire to create a kind of sister-community bond—Marcella, a friend from Puglia working in Rome, helped spark the connection—and we discovered immediately how the Faith and Light family knew how to help each other solve every inevitable crisis, even from afar.
The young people performed fearlessly in a theater not their own, preserving their natural rhythm and ease while showing deeper understanding of the story. They felt no real regret at missing a chance to explore a new city. Instead, with joy they focused on what mattered most: offering the performance as a gift to people they didn't know but felt close to—like friends they'd always known.
What did theater teach us? You don't reach a goal alone. You reach it together, each person offering their gift, onstage and behind it, sharing the exhaustion of a full day's work so the show succeeds, accepting the small imperfections born of emotion in a theater packed full again. That emotion brought tears, yes, but more than that—an empathy with the audience so real that our actors found themselves giving life to characters in wonderfully unexpected ways. It was a powerful, demanding experience, profoundly useful for building autonomy. For all of us in the community, preparing the performance and going on tour—with all the difficulties that came—strengthened our bonds. Meeting more often as we walked this path of friendship made us far more of a family.
Thrilled with what we'd lived, we couldn't wait on the drive home to do it again somewhere else. That harmony, that joy in sharing theater as a tool for growth and inclusion, led us to keep going. The following winter we toured other parishes in Rome: November 2014 at S. Giovanni de la Salle, and March 2015 at S. Chiara.
It was not, certainly, the work of great professionals. But Daniele as Pinocchio, Massimiliano as Geppetto, Laura as the Fairy—and the others, the list is far too long—whether onstage or behind the curtain, all of us are eager to say what beautiful, luminous threads were woven among our lives. To keep learning, as that puppet learned, slowly and with effort, what it truly means to be human.
Alessandra Ruggeri and Titti Cogliandro, 2015