Review: "Trovata una sega!" Sculpts a Spellbinding Story from an Episode of Art Forgery

Trovata una sega! Livorno, Modigliani, and the Legendary Prank of Summer ’84 (Trovata una sega! Racconto su Livorno, Modigliani e lo “scherzo del Secolo” dell’Estate ’84)

Written and performed by Antonello Taurino

May 17, 2026, at The Rat NYC, 68-117 Jay St., Brooklyn, NYC

May 18, 2026, at Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò at NYU, 24 W 12 St., Manhattan, NYC

 Antonello Taurino in Trovata una Sega! Courtesy Teatro della Cooperativa.
Research has shown that people will rate the exact same wine more highly if they believe it to be more expensive. The market, in other words, does not so much reflect as create value and prestige. Trovata una sega! Livorno, Modigliani, and the Legendary Prank of Summer ’84 (Trovata una sega! Racconto su Livorno, Modigliani e lo “scherzo del Secolo” dell’Estate ’84), a solo show from actor, comedian, author, and theater researcher Antonello Taurino, suggests that similar dynamics obtain in the art world. Winner of the Tramedautore Festival Selection (2015) and the Calandra Prize (2017), Trovata una sega! tells the twisty true story of a series of forgeries that surfaced in painter and sculptor Amedeo Modigliani's (1884-1920) hometown of Livorno as it celebrated the centennial of his birth. Taurino's often hilarious and always fascinating tale of the intersection of an act of fraud for fun with the forces of civic and personal self-promotion and the human desire for a good story, is presented in Italian, with supertitles by Mauro Ghidoni and Jacopo Villa of Ghidoni's English translation, as part of the 2026 In Scena! Italian Theater Festival, which runs this year from May 5 through 19 at various venues throughout the five boroughs.

While Trovata una sega! focuses on one hot summer in 1984, this extensively researched piece takes a long view of its subject, both bringing its story up to the present day by the end and looking all the way back to medieval times early on in order to contextualize the rivalry between Livorno and Pisa. That rivalry represents one thread in the fallout of the prank played by three young men in which they carved their own stone head in Modigliani's style and tossed it into a canal in Livorno, which the city was dredging in order to take advantage of a legend that Modigliani had disposed of some poorly received sculptures in this way in 1909 before returning to Paris. Before the show gets into the stranger-than-fiction intricacies of the 1984 prank and its aftermath, it sets the stage with a recounting of Modigliani's life (the artistic portion of which involved a good deal of drinking and having women model nude for him) and the birth and life of his daughter, Jeanne, who would go on to found her father's archive, write a biography of him, and position herself as the official authenticator of his works. Jeanne herself had written that the story of the Modigliani heads in the canal was apocryphal before Livorno decided to dredge in search of them. After all, as the internet has made extremely clear, one can always find a source somewhere to support a predetermined conclusion, especially when profit–in this case tourist dollars–is at issue. Watching the Pisan company contracted to do the dredging fail to find much besides trash, three twenty-year-old students, Pietro Luridiana, Michele Ghelarducci, and Francesco Ferrucci, decided to make sure that something was found, assuming that their forgery would quickly be exposed. Not only did this turn out to be very much not the case, but Luridiana, Ghelarducci, and Ferrucci were not the only forgers in play, and the story even includes a possibly suspicious death. And just when you think that the tale has concluded, there comes a coda brimming with irony.

Taurino tracks the story's network of interconnected players with clarity and humor, unfolding it at a compellingly brisk clip over about 80 minutes of high-energy performance complemented by a wealth of projected archival images. A Black and Decker drill makes a brief appearance, but otherwise Taurino fashions the show's sprawling story with just a table, a podium, and some paper, crumpled sheets of which are made to represent things as disparate as a widow leaping from a window and a stone head falling into a canal.

Modigliani may be one of the world's most faked artists, but the questions raised by Trovata una sega! apply far beyond his specific case and these specific forgeries. If, for example, an expert sees beauty in a piece of art, what does it matter, for the art-as-art, who made it? If it were proved tomorrow that Thomas Middleton actually wrote all of Macbeth, the play would still be what it has always been. The same holds true for a sculpture by some students making the most of a chance for some entertainment. And if they were not models of high-brow behavior, neither was Modigliani. There is another substance-abusing, womanizing artist who plays a role in the story, and what is the difference between him and Modigliani except that one was posthumously assigned value by the expert class and the other was not? Who gets to decide what's "bad" art and what's, say, catalog-worthy primitivism? The production also highlights how myths and misinformation are not easily retracted once in circulation, even when people are presented with clear evidence of the truth, a dynamic that seems to dominate public discourse these days. We see what we want to see, the show's story suggests, even experts (and it probably doesn't hurt that experts like the ones quoted from in Trovato una sega! are trained to come up with interpretations of anything put before them, even a chip in a carving). Not all of such credulousness is cynically motivated: like many in 1984 Livorno, people are often just in pursuit of a narrative with a happy ending. Perhaps the most important questions raised by Trovato una sega! for our moment, when, for example, art and AI (a kind of mass forgery tool) are colliding, are what we mean by value and how we might recognize that what something is worth doesn't need to mean how much it costs.

-Amedeo Modigliani John R. Ziegler and Leah Richards

More reviews from In Scena! 2026:
Closed for the Holiday
Patria, The Town of Cain and Abel
Tale of a Potato
Traviata - A Free Prose Opera
White Noise: Confessions of an Unsuspected Serial Killer with a Background Hiss

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