Nights in Rome

“You will explain a thousand facts, hitherto indecipherable.” (G. Vigolo, “La Virgilia”)

Someone will be reading this article on 9 August itself; it begins by referring to a mysterious death in the Tiber imagined to have taken place on the very same date, but in 1994: Five episodes were devoted to the investigation of the case – which was never solved – and were broadcast the following year on Rai 1 at a most unfortunate time slot, so that "Voci notturne", a miniseries conceived and written by Pupi Avati and directed by Fabrizio Laurenti, seemed destined to be forgotten. Beneath this apparent oblivion, however, word of mouth and the sharing of amateur recordings uploaded to YouTube by thousands of users continued to thrive.

“Where reason ends, a realm begins that does not belong to us, in which we are intruders,” read the closing line of the TV drama inspired by the esotericism of ancient Rome: “A land with rules we do not know, where a mysterious language is spoken and where our logic is of no use whatsoever”. Time has restored the reputation of "Voci notturne", which received a glowing review from critic Davide Pulici in "Nocturno" and was subsequently the subject of two essays—one by Gianlorenzo Franzì in 2015 and another by Andrea Scarabelli in 2025—but now fans can finally feast their eyes and watch it all again. First re-aired on Rai Premium in August 2013, the miniseries is available on RaiPlay, where you can also find an older series that immediately achieved cult status: "Il Segno del comando" (1971), directed by Daniele D’Anza, the work of a team of screenwriters among whom Giuseppe D’Agata stood out, who adapted it into a novel in 1987. The theme song, "Cento campane" by Fiorenzo Fiorentini and Romolo Grano, is hugely famous and, thanks to Lando Fiorini, became one of Rome’s classic songs.

There is more than one element in common between these TV dramas, and it is no coincidence that last spring the Genoese rock groups ExpiatoriA and Il Segno del comando (a band active since 1995 under this very name) released an album entitled Voci notturne. When certain works make a lasting impact, with an evocative quality that lends itself to multiple levels of interpretation, it means they harbour powerful content. The themes of the paranormal, presented with sophistication, were handled in very different ways: there is a profusion of elements in "Voci notturne", which suffered the cuts demanded by the Theosophical Society, whilst "Il Segno del comando" strikes a unique balance between spy thriller and the occult, with an ending that can be interpreted either through the lens of reincarnation or that of rationality (the latter, however, excluded from Avati’s screenplay). Those who live in Rome enjoy a further privilege, for both series allude to the city’s more subtle dimension, sacrificed to the hustle and bustle of daily life, whereby centuries-old events lie dormant amongst the streets and buildings because our gaze lingers on the stones without penetrating them.

To open oneself up to those imaginal planes, one must wander, as Marco Lodoli describes in "Isole": to veer off course, to tear oneself apart (the verb is his), to court, with a willingness to be amazed, ‘places that almost hide themselves so as not to be erased’ in the ‘great sea’ of the city. This was the approach adopted with metaphysical intent by another Roman author, Giorgio Vigolo, a poet, translator and musicologist who died in 1983 and is now almost forgotten. "Il Segno del comando" was indebted to him because he explained – giving us, too, hope that we might succeed – that one can tap into another time through certain spaces. His magical Rome lies between the Ponte and Regola districts; it is in Trastevere, where, in "Il Segno del comando", the English professor Lancelot Edward Forster – who has come to Rome in search of a square described by Lord Byron – pursues the elusive model Lucia but finds himself entangled in a tale of reincarnations that he will attempt to unravel by deciphering a score by the eighteenth-century musician Baldassarre Vitali.

In several short stories and in the novel "La Virgilia", which lay hidden in a drawer for sixty years, Vigolo yearned for something similar: "To seek the unknown within the known; to imagine that alongside the streets where I had walked so often since childhood, there might exist others so different and marvellous". It is the innermost aspiration of those who are not content with the solidity of places, of those who believe that Rome, beyond its chaotic noises, offers something more than the mineral silence of travertine. The poet Byron, with his spiritualist experiences, and the enigmatic Norberto Sinisgalli—who revived the rituals of the Ponte Sublicio in "Voci notturne"—re-emerge from the past and unite D’Agata, Avati and Vigolo in the allure of the unexpected, that vague desire for surprise which also inspired a singular book by Ercole Patti, a native of Catania but a Roman by adoption. "Gli ospiti di quel castello" (The Guests of That Castle), for which he won the Brancati Prize, was published three years after "Il Segno del comando" (The Sign of Command), though it set the events back to 1926. Passing through a small door behind Piazza San Silvestro, the protagonist finds himself “suddenly in a large park dotted with enormous trees; at the far end of a green lawn stretching out like an immense carpet, a solitary castle could be glimpsed”. He manages, with difficulty, to escape from this space-time bubble, which he will never find again: “Later, when I returned to the spot, I could no longer find that little alley which, even that morning, had been perfectly visible and tangible; I even remembered the doors of the little shops that flanked it”. The “vast, unexpected meadow in that very central spot in Rome, a stone’s throw from La Rinascente” has vanished forever (those who are not very young may recall the urban legend of a trapdoor near La Rinascente where, it was said, young women would disappear).

On smartphones, sat-nav instructions do not include a ‘psychogeographical guide’, because perhaps ‘only in our sleep do we feel we can find our way on unstable maps, through unexpected passages and routes that trace back along the timeline’: so argues the Turin-based mentalist Mariano Tomatis, who published such a guide for Il Segno del comando in 2023, whilst other enthusiasts have documented online what those places were like in 1971 and what they are like now, starting with the home of the model Lucia and the painter Marco Tagliaferri (the previous incarnation of Professor Forster) at 33 Via Margutta. Tomatis focused on the route to ‘Oberon’s house’, where the plot situates the necromantic experience endured by Byron and which corresponds to the Mazzei-Emo palace, situated between Via dei Coronari and the square of the same name, with its entrance at 38 Via dei Vecchiarelli. It is curious to note that, at the time of the TV series, the illustrious resident of that mansion, the philosopher Andrea Emo, hosted a literary salon frequented by Elémire Zolla and Cristina Campo; ‘it doesn’t take much imagination’, Tomatis continues, to picture the other guests: the Jungian Ernst Bernhard, Roberto Calasso, Guido Ceronetti, Federico Fellini and Luciano Emmer, “director of the TV series set in Rome, Geminus (1969), which, though not very successful, anticipated the magical atmosphere of Il Segno del comando by two years”. Reality and imagination, if they do not quite match, at least complement one another: it is not far-fetched to suggest that the conversations at the Emo residence were compatible with the storylines scripted by D’Agata together with Flaminio Bollini, Dante Guardamagna and Lucio Mandarà.

One is tempted to search through the vast body of writings left by Emo, who died in the same year as Vigolo, for some definition of Time that confirms the fragility of his line of thought thanks to those ‘unstable maps’. When asked, the mysterious philosopher (an adjective applicable to someone who never published a single line in his lifetime) replied: ‘Perhaps our true homeland is the past. That which is no longer, and which was never as we currently believe it to have been.” (Notebook 355, 1973); the year before, he had noted: “The survival of the past, even in a spectral present such as that of memory, is a sign, an awareness of immortality; it is the continuity of an infinity. Memory has a hidden eye that looks to the future”. (Notebook 351, 1972).

Walking back across the bridge, discovering a hidden castle right in the city centre, chasing after an unlikely Lucia or turning the clocks back – it’s not necessarily just a figment of the imagination. Ugo Pagliai, who played Professor Forster, confirms an episode he had spoken of years earlier in an interview with Paola Amadesi: “When the orchestra performed Psalm XVII from Baldassarre Vitali’s ‘Doppia Morte’ in the Basilica of Maxentius, the director D’Anza asked the script supervisor to time the piece. At the end, we saw her turn pale because the hand of the stopwatch, instead of moving forwards, had moved backwards for 36 seconds. Time had not passed. It had been taken away.” Many years later, Pagliai relives, “in flashes of memory, that magical, beautiful and unsettling atmosphere of the night-time shoots in the alleys of Rome”. Did he believe in such things? “I certainly did, because I never stepped out of character: I took Professor Forster to bed with me and slept with the script on my bedside table. I think Carla Gravina, who played Lucia, felt much the same. Whilst we were filming a dialogue in Trastevere, she was so absorbed that she replied to me as if we weren’t in front of the camera, or as if she really were Lucia. There was something that went beyond acting, and it was the same for all the actors. Every shot was as if bewitched: I remember that during a scene involving a séance, the birds suddenly started fluttering about and making a racket.” Pagliai looks back on the experience fondly: “Of course, talking now about who we were back then, we need to reflect a little more deeply to be able to recount it, but I’ve come to realise the significance of what we’d done over the course of my life.”

Paola Tedesco was just eighteen when she was cast as Barbara, the secretary to George Powell (Massimo Girotti), cultural attaché at the British Embassy in Rome. It is she who will help Forster unravel the mystery of the story before the fateful date of 28 March, when a destiny of reincarnations had predetermined her death. Today, the actress lives on Lake Trasimeno, having led a life marked by dance, theatre, wonderful intellectual friendships and sports cars. She landed a role in "Il Segno del comando" almost by chance: “When I attended the audition at Rai, Daniele D’Anza asked me to come up to the lectern. I told him there was no need, and he was taken aback, because I was the only one who’d learnt a passage by heart. So he cast me straight away. I was the youngest in the cast and everyone treated me with affection.” For some time, the crew moved to Naples, where Nicola Rubertelli’s sets were being built in the Rai studios and all the interior scenes were filmed. Paola Tedesco remembers the episode involving the stopwatch mentioned by Pagliai perfectly and swears that “it wasn’t a figment of my imagination”. When the drama series was broadcast (five episodes between 16 May and 13 June 1971), she immediately realised it was a hit, “because on the street I heard so many people humming ‘din don, din don…’, the chorus of Cento campane”.

Broadly speaking, certain coincidences reflect the major upheavals in Italian society: "Voci notturne" superimposed upon its esoteric plot one of the many corruption trials that had just marked the end of the First Republic. "Il Segno del comando", as Fabio Camilletti notes in his essay "Italia lunare", instead ushered in the most dramatic decade of the post-war period: the ‘Years of Lead’. Following the 1960s, when interest in the occult had flourished, the TV series “marks the moment when the ‘Italy of mysteries’ of the Sugar ‘Guides’ and the wanderings of Buzzati and Fellini gave way to ‘mysteries of Italy’ of a very different nature, against the backdrop of the Cold War and what would come to be known as the ‘strategy of tension’”.

There is no better month than August to explore the ‘psychogeography’ of Rome, when its hidden depths present themselves most tangibly to serendipity. Wishing to visit the oratories of San Gregorio al Celio (Sant’Onorio al Monte nel Segno del comando), where Professor Forster searched for the scores of the fictional Baldassarre Vitali, we found ourselves on an ‘island’ that Lodoli describes as ‘a small bay’, next to the majestic abbey where Vittorio Gassman’s funeral was held. Upon knocking, we discovered that it is home to the Sisters of Mother Teresa of Calcutta. They showed us the saint’s little room and the chapel where she used to pray. Everything remains just as it was when she was there.