Mystery Train. Un viaggio nell’immaginario americano

Freedom, frontier, industry, solitude: the train as an extraordinary metaphor of American modernity.

What did the train mean for a country like America? Modernity has penetrated a rural world through the tracks, forever changing the natural landscape as well as the anthropological one. In the second half of the Nineteenth century and up to the 1950s, the railway was an absolute protagonist of the American imagination, as a symbol of freedom but also of loneliness, progress but also of struggles and clashes between different social classes. And it is undoubtedly at the center of folk, blues and rock music production. From Woody Guthrie to Bruce Springsteen, from Nathaniel Hawthorne to Emily Dickinson, from Hawthorne to Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash.

Mystery Train. A journey into the American imagination retraces America’s relationship with the train through a fascinating history lesson in music.

Margherita Laterza actress
Matteo Portelli americanist
Alessandro Portelli, Gabriele Amalfitano musicians