Street Singers: An Interdisciplinary Perspective

Abstract

many different names (and one might think of even more) must indicate many different things. Or do they?They all refer to the street singers and performers of Renaissance Italy, and at first sight they appear to designate many distinct specializations within the large spectrum of interrelated activities that they carried out in the piazzas and marketplaces of the peninsula. Hence, cantastorie or canterini would be the specific names for the poet-singers, whose principal trade was to perform verses, stories, and songs, usually to musical accompaniment, in urban public (or semi-public) spaces, and whose mastery of words and music even allowed them to improvise their compositions; saltimbanchi or ioculatori would be used for the acrobats, jugglers, dancers, and conjurers, whose skills were physical more than verbal; istrioni and buffoni for the actors, either playing parts in comedies or performing solo their best set pieces; cerretani and ciurmadori for the charlatans and pedlars who advertised and sold their multifarious wares to passers-by whom they mesmerized with speeches, gestures, and images. Yet, all those wandering entertainers and itinerant salesmen were so protean, and therefore so elusive, that the more we deepen our knowledge of them (as far as the scarce documentation allows us to), the more we wonder whether the abovementioned labels really designated different arts and professions, or rather different aspects of the same multifaceted identity. If we try to create a taxonomy of the street singers, all of their different social and cultural characteristics no longer appear as distinct categories or careers. For the sake of convenience, in this issue we have chosen to favour the term cantastorie, but most of them could in fact be labelled with many other different names, depending on which of their facets was showing on a given occasion, or in a specific context, or in a particular period of their career.Cantastorie were, in the first place, oral poets. The heirs of medieval minstrels and jesters, they entertained, educated, and informed their audiences with a manifold repertoire 150 LUCA DEGL'INNOCENTI AND MASSIMO ROSPOCHER of narrative, lyrical, didactic, and dramatic works, either of other authors or of their own, drawing upon both the anonymous popular tradition and the production of canonical writers; historical and chivalric epics were one of their typical subjects, but they also sang about politics and current affairs, as well as performing amorous, comic, moral, religious, scientific and fantastical verses. Secondly, while their capacity to entrance broad audiences was founded on the attraction of their voices, they were often also skilled musicians, sometimes excellent players of stringed instruments such as the viola da braccio, to whose accompaniment they sang their verse. Thirdly, many of them were also successful actors and buffoons, as their vocal, mimetic, and mnemonic skills made them capable of impersonating different characters, each of them displaying a specific language and repertoir...