On stage, poet-playwright Igor Esposito and actor Daniele Russo are seated at a table next to two papier maché heads, with bin bags at their feet. The setting is Mantova's Cinema del Carbone, Via Oberdan, and the crowd is gathered to dive into Roberto Bolaño’s subversive poetic journey, in a 3-chapter interplay of narration and poetry reading over three days. Music by composer and performer Massimo Cordovani underscores the spoken word.

Each night, a new chapter traces Bolaño’s literary – and geographic – steps. We begin with his return to Chile from Mexico City in 1973 right before Pinochet’s coup d’état, where he founded the Infrarealist poetry movement together with Mario Santiago and Bruno Montané. The second chapter follows Bolaño’s move to Barcelona and his secluded time in Gerona, Spain, from where he exchanges disheartened letters with Enrique Linh. The third act covers the final years of Bolaño’s life, in pain due to severe hepatic impairment.

Beyond the leading roles, a cast of many is introduced along the way, all of whom whose lives intertwine to various extents with Bolaño’s and all of whom have left their mark on the history of poetry. They are dissident thinkers with unorthodox and unconventional lifestyles such as Darío Galicia, Carlos Pezoa Velis, Jorge Teiller, Alfonso Alcalde, Gonzalo Millán, Rodrigo Lira, Leopoldo Maria Panero, Carmen Boullosa, Juan Rodolfo Wilcock, Mario Santiago and Osvaldo Lamborghini.

The show ends with a display as unconventional as the poets who have been introduced. At the end of the first chapter, they face the audience and pull two t-shirts out of their bin bags. They then place the mannequin heads into the bags and turn their backs to the audience, showing the writing Ejército de Chile. They then proceed to blindfold Cordovani while he plays. At the end of the second chapter, Russo draws a lipstick and puts it on, while Esposito extracts and wears a monkey mask from the bin bag, and the two share a kiss. At the end of the third and final chapter, the two interpreters read one of Bolaño's last poems. Then, they light two candles and blow them out. As the smoke dissolves in the air, a gentle symphony played by Cordovani precedes the roaring applause of the audience.