Florence on Stage: The City in the Theater

We have already written about the lost theaters of the city, yet over the centuries Florence has also been a great protagonist of theatrical writing itself — lending itself perfectly as the ideal backdrop for certain stories, and drawing in countless leading figures of the arts, thanks in no small part to the many important playhouses the city has always kept.

Machiavelli’s La Mandragola

As far back as the 16th century, theater in Florence was an active part of the city’s cultural life — an occasion for entertainment and sociability, but also for protest and reflection. On this score it is impossible not to mention what is considered the masterpiece of 16th-century theater: La Mandragola (The Mandrake). This comedy in five acts, written by Niccolò Machiavelli between 1512 and 1520, met with such lasting success that in later centuries it was admired by the likes of Voltaire and Goldoni.

Yet beyond the fame won by Machiavelli’s theatrical masterpiece, what is most striking is how the play — for all its funny plot and tangled intrigues, between one laugh and the next — is in fact a full-blown satire denouncing the corruptibility of Florentine, and more broadly Italian, society of the day. Unmasking hypocrisy, it shows with real candor just how far morality had slipped, calling into question even family values and, higher still, the authorities of Renaissance Florence.

First staged at court in 1518, during a run of theatrical works marking the announcement of the marriage of Lorenzo II de’ Medici to Madeleine de La Tour d’Auvergne, La Mandragola is set entirely in the Florence of its time and is written in the popular Florentine vernacular. The comedy brings to life a cast of almost uniformly unsavory characters — chief among them Friar Timoteo, the priest who for money agrees to persuade young Lucrezia to betray her husband, a device Machiavelli uses to denounce the corruptibility of the religious world of the age.

Then there is the critique aimed at the middle class through the figure of Callimaco, a young bourgeois in love with Lucrezia who will stop at nothing to have her, helped along by his sponging friend Ligurio — another unstable character, driven solely by his own interests. More deplorable still is the conduct of Lucrezia’s mother, Sostrata, who — in order to keep up a respectable façade, so to speak — convinces her daughter to play dirty just so she can bear a child. The victim of this whole contrivance is poor, gullible Nicia, Lucrezia’s husband, who in the end is both swindled and cuckolded.

In short, all of this fully mirrors the Florentine society of the age — one built on appearances to be kept up at any cost, on people interested only in themselves and in money. Every social class, from the clergy to the middle class, comes under Machiavelli’s fire, in a vision that is thoroughly bleak and pessimistic.

Goldoni and La Locandiera

Leaping forward now to the 18th century, another theatrical masterpiece took shape in these years and went on to make history: Carlo Goldoni’s La Locandiera (The Mistress of the Inn), a celebrated comedy in three acts written in 1752.

We know that Carlo Goldoni was Venetian by birth, but we also know that he set his masterpiece in Florence, in a typical Florentine inn. The real reason for choosing the Tuscan capital is that setting the story in his native Venice would have been awkward: as the homeland of the Commedia dell’Arte, it would surely have been quick to attack the theatrical form he had chosen instead — the so-called “comedy of character.”

In this Florentine inn we find Mirandolina, a shrewd woman and a skilled manipulator of men for her own ends — so expert that she even makes the Cavaliere di Ripafratta, a lifelong woman-hater, fall for her. Dodging danger, refusing to bow to defeat, and sheer presumption are among the themes the play brings out, but they are also, above all, the defining traits of a particular social class — the rising bourgeoisie, embodied by the heroine herself. The nobility, too, is a target for Goldoni, through the characters of the Count and the Marquis, both certain they will get what they want simply because they are noble.

It should be said that we are in the era of the Enlightenment, and although La Locandiera is not exactly a representative work of that historical current, it does bring to the fore its two central concerns: the debate over social classes and how the differences between them might be smoothed away in favor of a peaceful coexistence, and the self-determination of the individual, which we see plainly in Mirandolina — who, as a woman, embodies it all the more powerfully.

In honor of Carlo Goldoni, a theater was inaugurated in Florence in 1817 and named, fittingly, the Teatro Goldoni, right in the historic center, between Via Romana and Via dei Serragli. The idea had been born in 1807, when the impresario Luigi Gargani bought the premises of the Third Order Dominican nuns of the Monastery of Annalena to create a kind of hub for leisure and entertainment — in step with the tendencies of the age, which now saw theater no longer as the exclusive amusement of the court and the aristocracy, as it had been in the Medici era, but as something for the other social classes too, and for the middle class in particular, which was steadily gaining ground.

The aim was that everyone in the Florence of the day should be able to attend the city’s theaters, so that theater might take on the task of bringing the tastes and manners of the different social classes into line, welcoming a thoroughly mixed audience. In practice, however, the gap between the various classes only grew sharper — as could be seen in where the audience was placed inside the theaters during a performance: the Court, the Nobility and the Grand Dukes took the boxes, the middle class the stalls, and the common people the gallery. So much for uniformity: in practice it was hardly put into effect at all.

This was the era of the rule of the House of Habsburg-Lorraine, which held the Grand Duchy of Tuscany from 1737 until 1860, and under which Florence became an exuberant, lively cultural center. In that setting, theater turned into an occasion to be seen in society, as if the real spectacle were the audience itself, intent on showing off its wealth and social standing.

Beyond this, in the Lorraine era — and especially under Grand Duke Peter Leopold — theatrical activity was liberalized on April 25, 1776, so that each theater could stage its preferred repertoire at any time of year.

Among the theaters that enjoyed the greatest success at the time — though originally founded back in the 1650s — were La Pergola and the Teatro del Cocomero. From the 18th century on, La Pergola, known as the “noble theater,” was among the finest Italian opera houses, where figures such as Vivaldi and Verdi staged their works; the Teatro del Cocomero, renamed the Teatro Niccolini in the early 20th century, was frequented by the likes of Alfieri and, indeed, Giovan Battista Niccolini. It was here, too, in 1793, that the character of Stenterello came to life — created by the Florentine actor Luigi del Buono and later becoming the traditional mask of Florence.

De Musset’s Lorenzaccio

Another major work belongs to these years — 1834, to be precise — and it cannot go unmentioned: Lorenzaccio, by the Parisian Alfred de Musset. Although composed in the 19th century, it is set in Renaissance Florence, with the nineteen-year-old Lorenzino de’ Medici as its protagonist — a young man enthralled by the heroes of antiquity, from whom he takes his cue as he dreams of restoring the Republic to Florence.

De Musset’s Lorenzo is half Romantic hero, half a man incapable of ever truly seeing anything through — the perfect illustration of how futile every human act can be. This pessimism about the vanity of human action did not arise by chance, but out of the history the author had lived through, and in particular the failure of the French Revolution and the events that followed — drawing a parallel with Florence’s own age of splendor under Lorenzo the Magnificent, which ended with his death and with the French invasion that conquered the city.

L’acqua cheta, comedy in the Florentine vernacular

Taking yet another leap in time, to the turn of the 20th century — amid historical and, of course, artistic upheavals — we come to another theatrical gem: the comedy L’acqua cheta (Still Waters), written in 1892 by the Florentine Augusto Novelli.

The title, drawn from the well-known saying “still waters wear away the bridges” — itself going back to a Latin proverb — already hints at the story’s central idea: that what looks calm and quiet in fact conceals harm. Novelli’s comedy, written (let us not forget) in the Florentine vernacular, is set in the San Niccolò district of Florence and follows the comic misadventures and squabbles of a middle-class family. The leads are two women, sisters Anita and Ida — the one in love with Cecco and ready to defy her family for him, the other the “still water” of the situation, carrying on a secret, clandestine affair with a young man named Alfredo.

Here again, then, we find yet another indictment of the Florentine society of the day — its manners, its appearances to be preserved — against which the young protagonists rebel, breaking their ties with a model of society that prizes convention and masks.

Florence, it turns out, has been a great protagonist of the theater — as setting, but above all as subject — perfectly suited to the stories its authors wished to tell, while also offering passion and enthusiasm to those who practiced the art: first its courts and then its theaters, and always its history, which, as ever, has made itself the ideal stage.