“A Midsummer Night’s Dream”
Giovanni Soccol
“…another moon – but O, methinks how slow this old moon wanes!”
“…four nights will quickly dream away the time: and then the moon – like to a silver bow new-bent in heaven – shall behold the night of our solemnities”
“…thou hast by moonlight at her window sung with feigning voice verses of feigning love”
“…chanting faint hymn’s to the cold fruitless moon”
“Take time to pause, and by the next new moon – the sailing day betwixt my love and me for everlasting bond of fellowship…”
“Tomorrow night, when Phoebe doth behold her silver visage in the watery glass, decking with liquid pearl the bladed grass – a time that lovers’ flights doth still conceal – through Athens gates have we devised to steal”
My reading stops at this point. I am at the scene before the first act of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and the moon has already appeared several times in the text to create the magic of space.
This constant appearance of the moon throughout the work, both as a character and as a magical force that creates atmosphere, brings me to an empty stage awaiting its enactment. It is at this moment that Luciana’s world opens up in a vision that stimulates my imagination, offering me the elements for realization: alchemical moons, infusing the magic of appearance into the elements used, and these treated as chemicals – measured and calibrated for a space that spreads beyond the boundaries of the field on which one works – which, if the dose is wrong, become poisons.
With these thoughts in mind, I left Luciana’s studio, thinking about her world which, starting from the dimensions of the canvas, leads me to realise a vision of Shakespeare – that is, of the mysterious forces that animate the universe.
“The moon methinks looks with a watery eye; and when she weeps, weeps every little flower, lamenting some enforced chastity”.
Venice, October 2025
