A Medieval Italian Hill Town in Tuscany by Marc Zakian
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There are no strangers in Monticchiello. Secreted among the bobbing hills of the Orcia valley - with 300 villagers and one road in and out - everybody knows everybody here. It’s a good thing, because for three weeks of the year everybody in town is somebody else.
It’s the first night of the Teatro Povero and Monticchiello is stage struck. The annual play - written, directed and performed by the townsfolk - began 30 years ago as a rallying cry to villagers leaving for the towns and cities. Three decades later, it is still going strong.
Visiting during the three week run is surreal: people I met by day become protagonists in a play about themselves by night. Daniele Mangiavacchi first trod the boards aged nine to 30 years on he’s a Teatro Povero veteran. Daniele is almost as big as the tiny local dress shop he owns. He calls the boutique his ‘invention’ - the job he created so he wouldn’t have to leave Monticchiello.
Cladio Casiroli joins us in the shop, and there’s barely room to swing a Donna Karen. A ‘newcomer’ to Monticchiello, Claudio came to see a show in 1967, fell in love with one of the performers, married her and never left. Daniele and Claudio run though their lines, bemusing a tourist trying to buy a sunhat.
That evening, I joined a couple of hundred spectators in Piazza San Martino - the town’s main square - to watch the show. Daniele and Claudio play a pair of scheming businessmen trying to buy Monticchiello - promising to make the residents rich if they appear in an internet game based on village life. The problem is a peasant family who refuse to sell their podere - a farmhouse, at the heart of Tuscan life.
The Signora of the podere - played by the local nurse – kneads a lump of dough, complaining that the yeast she bought isn’t rising properly. Her husband banters that she needn’t worry, something else will be rising later. As bats flap in and out of the stage lights, the audience laughter of drifts up into the twighlight. For the spectators – over 5,000 who come to Monticchiello during the three-week run – it’s a deeply felt question: how does small community hold on to its traditional way of life.
Stalking the backstage is Teatro Povero’s shaggy-maned director - local school teacher Andrea Cresti. A childhood visit to a puppet show ignited Cresti’s love for theatre, and after twenty-three year as director his passion is undiminished. “Our show is a beacon for the small town,” he enthuses. “It sends out a message to a society that wants to forget its past”.
After the bouquets and curtain calls we head for the town church. During the run the crypt is christened Il Bronzone - a trattoria-cum-meeting-place for actors and audience. This unholy use of sanctified ground comes courtesy of Don Vasco Neri - the village priest who takes to the boards when the character of a padre is written into the play. Locals wise-crack that they only give him the part because he has the costume.
With more than a third of the village involved in the production, Il Bronzone fizzes with post-show chatter. Over a Pici pasta I met Alpo, the town’s septuagenarian plumber. Alpo was responsible for piping water into Monticchiello’s medieval houses, but he’s best known as a comedy actor who plays the fixer - a rustic Arthur Daley who keeps the peace. When characters fall out, it is Alpo who sorts thing. He’s being at it since the first Teatro Povero in 1967, and reckons that the plays have shaped his life.
Richard Andrews agrees, “Alpo looks five years younger during the run of the play”. Andrews, a professor of Italian, is a Teatro Povero devotee. He’s been making his annual pilgrimage from England since 1983, and the locals have so taken to ‘Professore Deek’ that he never stays in a hotel.
This little dot of a Tuscan village had no idea that their play “is the only example of a town writing, staging and performing its own play in all Europe,” Andrews explains. “It’s extraordinary how a town can be pulled together by a cultural enterprise. It’s like community therapy – people feel more healthy after they put on the play”.
Monticchiello is a healthy place for visitors during of the run of the play. You sense the town is sharing something with you; baring its collective soul; giving you an insight into Tuscany beyond the sunflowers and cypress trees. The atmosphere makes you linger and, who knows, if you stay long enough they might even give you a role.