Camicette Bianche – The Musical

Camicette Bianche is a yellowed photograph from a hundred years ago; a treasure chest that contains and reveals to us stories, letters, and original documents from the time. An original theatrical work that, through the music of Italian light, lyrical, and folk traditions, becomes the voice of the feelings of immigrants toward America.” Camicette Bianche is a highly choral original musical that celebrates the memory of our emigrants: a journey from Sicily to America in the early 1900s that connects, like a string around a cardboard suitcase, the lives of our emigrants with those of migrants throughout history.

A show that combines the music of the folk tradition with some Italian songs rearranged in a theatrical key, along with the early songs of the first Italian-Americans, to tell the true story of Clotilde Terranova, a young seamstress involved in the tragic fire at the white shirt factory in New York in 1911.

To date, the show has over 100 performances in Italy and abroad. In 2024, it reached some very important milestones: in July, it was performed in Los Angeles during the world tour of the Italian school ship Amerigo Vespucci; in November, it was staged in New York as part of the project “Ti racconto Agrigento – a cultural bridge between Agrigento and New York” to tell the story of the 2025 Italian Capital of Culture; and in December, it was presented at the Teatro San Babila in Milan.

 

 

PLOT

Sicily, 1907. Clotilde Terranova embarks for New York to rejoin her sister Rosa. On board she meets Salvatore Spadaro, a Sicilian young man who was weary with misery and hunger. Together with the other passengers, Clotilde and Salvatore share their dreams, desires, hopes and nostalgia for their motherland: Sicily. Once arrived in Ellis Island, Clotilde and Salvatore go their separate ways: she learns English and begins to work in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory; Salvatore, however, falls into the clutches of Italian-American organized crime, becoming a “picciotto”, the henchman of the Black Hand. Clotilde participates in a strike for women’s rights and devotes her little free time to some amusement with her new friends in a restaurant based in Little Italy. In that restaurant Salvatore blackmails the owner Angelo, but Clotilde catches him out. A dramatic fight follows, a fight that will bring to light the frustration and pain of the American dream.

Clotilde will abandon Salvatore to his future, and a few days later, on 25 March 1911, the famous fire will break out in the factory: Clotilde is panicking, she’s trapped on the tenth floor. It was then that she will decide to jump out the window wondering she will re-embrace her mother. “Camicette Bianche – il musical” is inspired by the self-titled book of Ester Rizzo, published by Navarra Editore, that narrates a true historical event bringing to light the story of Clotilde and many forgotten Italian workers. Ester had searched the victims’ names of the fire, discovering that many were Sicilian and began to reconstruct the cities where they were born, making named them streets, squares… The cities of origin of young migrants have been identified almost all to date.