Theatre of Italy
The theatre of Italy originates from the Middle Ages, with its background dating back to the times of the ancient Greek colonies of Magna Graecia, in southern Italy, the theatre of the Italic peoples and the theatre of ancient Rome. It can therefore be assumed that there were two main lines of which the ancient Italian theatre developed in the Middle Ages. The first, consisting of the dramatization of Catholic liturgies and of which more documentation is retained, and the second, formed by pagan forms of spectacle such as the staging for city festivals, the court preparations of the jesters and the songs of the troubadours.
Renaissance humanism was also a turning point for the Italian theatre. The recovery of the ancient texts, both comedies and tragedies, and texts referring to the art of the theatre such as Aristotle's Poetics, also gave a turning point to representational art, which re-enacted the Plautian characters and the heroes of Seneca's tragedies, but also building new texts in the vernacular.
The commedia dell'arte was, at first, an exclusively Italian phenomenon. Commedia dell'arte spread throughout Europe, but it underwent a clear decline in 18th century.
During the second half of the 19th century, the romantic tragedy gave way to the Teatro verista. At the beginning of the 20th century, the influences of the historical avant-gardes made themselves felt: Futurism, Dadaism and Surrealism. The second post-war period was characterized by the Teatro di rivista.
Background
Ancient Greek theater in Magna Graecia
The Sicilian Greek colonists in Magna Graecia, but also from Campania and Apulia, also brought theatrical art from their motherland. The Greek Theatre of Syracuse, the, the, the, the, the, the and the most famous Greek Theater of Taormina, amply demonstrate this.Only fragments of original dramaturgical works are left, but the tragedies of the three great giants Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides and the comedies of Aristophanes are known.
Some famous playwrights in the Greek language came directly from Magna Graecia. Others, such as Aeschylus and Epicharmus, worked for a long time in Sicily. Epicharmus can be considered Syracusan in all respects, having worked all his life with the tyrants of Syracuse. His comedy preceded that of the more famous Aristophanes by staging the gods for the first time in comedy. While Aeschylus, after a long stay in the Sicilian colonies, died in Sicily in the colony of Gela in 456 BC. Epicarmus and Phormis, both of 6th century BC, are the basis, for Aristotle, of the invention of the Greek comedy, as he says in his book on Poetics:
Other native dramatic authors of Magna Graecia, in addition to the Syracusan Formides mentioned, are Achaeus of Syracuse, Apollodorus of Gela, Philemon of Syracuse and his son Philemon the younger. From Calabria, precisely from the colony of Thurii, came the playwright Alexis. While Rhinthon, although Sicilian from Syracuse, worked almost exclusively for the colony of Taranto.
Italic theater
The Italic peoples such as the Etruscans had already developed forms of theatrical literature. The legend, also reported by Livy, speaks of a pestilence that had struck Rome, at the beginning, and the request for Etruscan historians. The Roman historian thus refused the filiation from the Greek theater before contacts with Magna Graecia and its theatrical traditions. There are no architectural and artistic testimonies of the Etruscan theater. A very late source, such as the historian Varro, mentions the name of a certain Volnio who wrote tragedies in the Etruscan language.Even the Samnites had original representational forms that had a lot of influence on Roman dramaturgy such as the Atellan Farce comedies, and some architectural testimonies such as the theater of Pietrabbondante in Molise, and that of Nocera Superiore on which the Romans built their own.
Ancient Roman theater
With the conquest of Magna Graecia, the Romans came into contact with Greek culture, therefore also with the theater. Probably already, after the wars with the Samnites, the Romans had already known representative art, but also the Samnite representations, in turn, were influenced by the Greek ones. The apex of the expression of the Roman theater was reached, for the comedy by Livius Andronicus, a native of Magna Graecia, probably Taranto, who was the link between the Greek and Latin theater. Less famous author, but always a bridge between the Greeks and the Italian colonies and the Latins was Gnaeus Naevius from Campania, who lived at the time of the Punic Wars. Nevio tried to create a politicized theater, in the Athenian style of Aristophanes, but the poet's arrows too often struck famous gens such as that of the Scipios. For this reason the playwright was exiled to Utica where he died poor. On the contrary, Ennius, also from Magna Graecia, used the theater to incense the Roman noble families.The major followers of Latin comedy, still linked to Greek comedy, were Plautus and Terence who Romanized the texts of Greek comedies. Plautus is considered a more popular poet, as is Caecilius Statius, while Terence is considered more of a purist as well as Lucius Afranius considered the Latin Menander. In the tragic field, Seneca was the greatest among the Latins, but the philosopher never reached the heights of Greek examples. While a tragic of Latin imprint was Ennius, whose works were highly appreciated by the aristocracy.
There were many passages that led from the primitive Latin comedy to the great playwrights mentioned above. The Roman theater was similar to the Greek one, although there were differences, both from the architectural point of view and from the clothing of the actors. These used masks and coats like the Greek ones. Even the Roman theaters had a cavea and a fixed tripartite scenography. Many scenographies have remained as evidence of this typology, both in the colonies as in Leptis Magna, today in Libya, which almost integrates it. In Italy it is rarer to find in similar conditions. In Rome, the comedy was probably more welcome than the tragedy, also given the originality of the texts that freed itself from the Greek tradition with themes closer to everyday reality.
The true popular expression of the Roman theater can be identified in the representations called Atellane. These were satirical comedies of Osco-Samnite imprint recited in the local dialect, and then spread to the rest of the Empire, in Rome itself in the first place.
Origins of Italian theatre
The origins of Italian theatre are a source of debate among scholars, as they are not yet clear and traceable with certain sources. Since the end of the theatre of ancient Rome, which partly coincided with the fall of the Western Roman Empire, mimes and comedies were still performed. Alongside this pagan form of representation, mostly performed by tropes and wandering actors of which there are no direct written sources, the theatre was reborn, in medieval times, from religious functions and from the dramatization of some tropes of which the most famous and ancient is the short Quem quaeritis? from the 10th century, still in Latin.It can therefore be assumed that there were two main lines on which the ancient Italian theatre developed. The first, consisting of the dramatization of Catholic liturgies and of which more documentation is retained, and the second, formed by pagan forms of spectacle such as the staging for city festivals, the court preparations of the jesters and the songs of the troubadours.
Medieval theatre
The theatre historian therefore based his research method, in the field of the origins of Italian theatre, not only on the actual study of his own subject but also combining it with ethnological and anthropological study as well as that of religious studies in a broad sense.File:Paolo Uccello 040.jpg|thumb|150px|Jacopone da Todi in a fresco by Paolo Uccello in the cathedral of Prato
The Catholic Church, which found in the dramatization of the liturgies a more than favorable welcome from the masses, as demonstrated by the development of theatrical practice on major holidays, paradoxically had a contradictory behavior towards them: if on the one hand it allowed and encouraged their diffusion, however he always deprecated its practice, because it was misleading from the principles of Catholicism. The pagan spectacles suffered the same fate, where the judgments and measures taken by the religious were much harsher: still in 1215, a Constitution of the Lateran Council forbade clerics to have contact with histrions and jugglers. The strong contrast of religious authority to theatrical practice decreed a series of circumstances that differentiate medieval theatre from that known from Humanism onwards, much closer to the modern concept of theatrical representation. For over ten centuries there was never the construction of a theatrical building, unlike what happened in ancient Greece and imperial Rome.
Despite the numerous restrictions, the vernacular dramaturgy develops due to the trouvères and jesters, who sing, lute in hand, the most disparate topics: from love driven towards women to mockery towards the powerful. There is evidence in the Laurentian Rhythm of 1157 and in other more or less contemporary rhythms such as the Rhythm of Sant'Alessio, of the dramatization in verse by anonymous people in the vernacular, although the metric is still indebted to the Latin versification. More famous is the XIII century Rosa fresca aulentissima, by Cielo d'Alcamo, a real jester mime destined for stage representation, which does not spare double entenders and overly licentious jokes towards the fair sex in verses.
Even more articulated were the texts of Ruggieri Apuliese, a jester of the 13th century of which there is little or no news, mostly discordant, but in which a sardonic ability can be traced to parody and dramatize the events, enclosed in his gab and serventesi. During the 13th century, however, the jester prose in the vernacular suffered a setback due to the marginalization of the events to which it was linked: representations in Curta, street performances, and more of which the chronicle does not remember.