Customs

THE MASK CHARACTER OF ARLECCHINO

A black mask with a little spot on his forehead, a cap on his head and an unmistakable multi-coloured dress, Arlecchino, the dull and pretty ingenuous servant renowned all over the world, is from Bergamo. With him, the Italian Comedy, the typical theatre performance in vogue in the 1500's, was born and the theatre became a profession.
On the right bank of the River Brembo, not far away from San Giovanni Bianco, in the little village of Oneta, there is an austere medieval building, which wouldn’t be worth mentioning but for the fact that, according to the tradition, is Arlecchino’s house. 

Outside the old stone house, beside the entrance-staircase, you can still see some traces of a fresco representing the well-known multi-coloured mask character. At the bottom of the fresco, a scroll ornament says: “Chi non è de cortesia / non entraghe en casa mia./ Se ne viene un poltron/ ghe darò del me baston.” (“Who isn’t kind / don’t enter my house / if a sluggard comes / I’ll beat him with my stick”).According to the tradition, around 1356 a French gentleman, Count of Lovence, ran away from his village and retired to Val Brembana taking with him his servant, a quite greedy boozer. One day, caught stealing, the servant was beaten and condemned to hang about the neighbouring villages on donkey back, dressed in patches of different colours to be better hold up to everybody’s mockery. Such was the curiosity and the fun of the people that, on the following year, some lads a bit drunken wanted to dress up like him.  But this is just one of the many suppositions on the origins of the mask character of Arlecchino. Another one - the oddest of all - relates his name even to a representation of the devil. It’s quite difficult to see in the features of this dull and ingenuous zany a soul possessed by the devil. Even if actually the black prominence on his forehead seems to recall indeed...the devil’s horns. 

Dante writes about a demon called Alichino, met in the fifth bolgia of the eighth hell ring. 
However, even if many scholars in the course of time tempted to go back to the etymology of the name of the well-known mask character, tracing it in France, Germany or in England, they all agree that Arlecchino’s soul is Italian. Furthermore, Arlecchino’s from Bergamo, even when he speaks in other languages. 

The inhabitants of Bergamo quite knew when in 1904 they rose up with petitions and riots against the thesis of a great German scholar, Otto Dreissen, according to which Arlecchino came from Northern Europe. Tristano Martinelli, the first reported harlequin, a very popular actor of the end of the 1500's, well-established at the Gonzaga Court and really appreciated by Maria de’ Medici, was Italian as well. The deep origins of this mask character can be found in the Bergamo's tradition of the zanies, the comedy characters with their cheeky looks, grimaces, pirouettes and capers: they were usually servants and speak in an international dialect of Bergamo. Arlecchino’s comicality comes out of his lively gestures , his harsh, incomprehensible way of speaking, his matchless aptitude for getting into trouble. No, he isn’t bad. Maybe he is a bit lazy; he’s not fond of hard work, especially when there’s no immediate benefit from it. But he’s kind-hearted and a bit ingenuous. Problems fall upon him but he doesn’t lose his heart and, in the end, he always manages to wriggle out of it, to find a way out. It’s probably because of that that generations of Italians have always identified themselves with him and, still today, although the mask characters have declined, Arlecchino lives on in the memory and in the popular conscience strongly as always. It’s one of the few names universally considered a synonym of theatre even by whom doesn’t know what the theatre is.