A piazza. Historical heart of the city. Once it was a meeting place... now big cities can probably exist made up of streets alone. There are only some people who are hanging around the shadow of this “protected” space. They are youths in trouble who are desperate and on the edge of society. There’s some drug dealing. There is an equestrian statue in the middle of the piazza. Who is it? Carlo Alberto? Maybe. Who remembers more? There is no time to stop. There is no time to ask and answer. People pass and go away. City monuments! Tons of bronze with no history, with no memory! We shall give that king – frozen in his bronze statue “to be beyond the reach of insults” – the gift of the emotions of his last battle. “For now, for this moment, and again for this once” there are the rustlings of men brushing through the cornfields, the smells of troubles and gunpowder, and the flashes of enemy fire.
Twelve thousand maize plants, a piece of the countryside, of that land to win back.
Novara 1849, the defeat. An enormous mirror monolith “transports” the monument. Carlo Alberto, reflected among the corn stalks, is again at the center of the battle. Every night a different soldier – dirty, tired, and depressed – sprouts up among the plants. This is the Piedmontese army. Mirrors, little mirrors, big mirrors, lights – all of these multiply and change. Then there are horses, one hundred horses, one hundred thousand soldiers. There they are here, then there. They run back and forth and there he is in the middle of it all for his last war. And... the people watch. They finally get to watch the king, Carlo Alberto.