The Market Fair

Among the various theatrical features in the Hall of the Fair are a suspended ceiling representing an enormous and colourful circus tent and, on the back wall, a giant blow-up image of Jacques Callot’s “La Fiera dell’Impruneta”. This famous painting, dated 1620, depicts a great fair in Florence and is the Museum’s symbol of all the pre-industrial market fairs that brought to life countless town squares over a period of seven hundred years. The tradition began in the 11th century and continued until the Industrial Revolution, changing the way people worked and enjoyed themselves. 

Another glimpse of the Sala della Fiera which presents on the wall and on the monitor various stories relating to the Commedia dell'Arte or mask theatre, the puppet and marionette theatre and the most curious fairground characters. Here are some of them.

Jugglers performed public shows in the town squares, showing off their physical dexterity, balance and manipulation. Here, an organ grinder plays beside the juggler, and behind him is a small pavilion for “magic lantern” projections. 

The charlatans, especially in the 15th and 16th centuries, were the true kings of the square and the masters of the subtle art of deception. After bombastic declamations that aroused delirious enthusiasm among the crowd, they peddled miraculous potions they claimed would cure all the world's ills.
They were often poor wandering devils, skilled at pretending to be herbalists, physicians, alchemists, and conjurers, and doing all sorts of quack medical “treatments” to scrape together a living.

Above all the characters that enlivened the medieval fair, the market hucksters stood out as genuine showmen and sellers of goods and words. Gifted with formidable speech and mimicry and great powers of persuasion, they knew how to make people buy what they wanted them to or send them where they wanted them to go. Gifted with limitless imagination, they created gags, sketches, and short pantomimes, and often improvised skits and hilarious jokes in order to outshine their competitors and hold the audience’s attention. They were the first to put on a show and incorporate the element of entertainment into the fairs as a commercial ploy. In those days, advertising was only by word of mouth.

In the 16th century, during the Renaissance, organised groups of actors were formed in the town squares. They travelled from town to town on carts with their clothes and props together with the necessary baggage for everyday life, performing on crude wooden stages in the squares of many Italian and European cities. Each actor wore a mask to identify their character. They were truly extraordinary: they knew how to be actors, mimes, singers, musicians, and acrobats who told stories based on the daily life of the time. Brighella, Harlequin, Pantalone and Dr Balanzone were all caricatures of archetypal personalities of the era. It was a theatre of popular satire against the powerful, of the poor against the rich, a theatre that delighted the common people, but was often opposed by the authorities for obvious reasons.
After three centuries of success, the Commedia dell'Arte saw its decline at the end of the 18th century with Carlo Goldoni's Reform of the theatre, based on the ideals of the new emerging middle class. 

Beginning in the 17th century and continuing for 400 years, the puppet and marionette theatres served the same function as television does today: they provided information, entertainment, and fun. In the 19th century, more than 700 puppet companies performed in Italy. Only when cinema and television stole their audience were puppet and marionette theatres forced to adapt their repertoires to children’s entertainment in order to survive. Yet the Puppet and Marionette Theatre is a great piece of Italian cultural heritage that deserves to be rediscovered and revitalised. The Museum tells the story to its visitors through entertaining slideshows on wall monitors and large screens.

The Museum has reconstructed the history of all these eclectic characters. Beginning as court jesters in medieval castles, they eventually migrated to the fairgrounds, putting on public shows to make a living. The shows created at the Fair, from the Commedia dell'Arte to the puppet and marionette theatre, reflect the socio-cultural reality of the time. These shows not only provided entertainment, but played an important cultural role, exploring themes that reflected the problems of the common people: justice, peace, happiness, and health.  

The birth of the Equestrian Circus is such a fantastical adventure that it can be told like a fairytale. Once upon a time, towards the end of the 18th century, there was an English boy named Philip Astley. At the age of 17, he enlisted in a regiment of His Majesty's Royal Cavalry in London, with the task of training horses. His military exploits immediately earned the admiration of his fellow soldiers and gained him a reputation as a skilled horseman. He also took part in the Seven Years' War, winning honour and glory, but one day fate had it that he met a beautiful lady horseback rider and fell madly in love. He left the army and married the beautiful rider, the daughter of a vaulter. Thus, he happily entered a world that fascinated him: the world of acrobats. 

Historians remember that when Astley took to the stage, wearing the uniform of his regiment and riding his warhorse Gibraltar, he excited the crowds and earned the attention of many ardent female admirers: he was handsome and elegant, and an exceptional dancer. He wore his military uniform when he presented the shows, which involved 150 people.
The acrobatic rider was the backbone of the circus for a long time: he would “charge” like a warrior and vault, gallop, pass from one horse to another, ride on a horse that fell as if dead at a rifle shot, or on another that sat like a dog, and on and on and on.

The big tents supported by central masts, the iconic image of the Circus today, were invented around 1850 in the United States by pharmacist Gilbert Spaulding, who had taken up the Circus life. These giant tents increased the capacity of the pavilions to include 10,000 spectators and allowed the Circus itself to be mobile, becoming a travelling spectacle and the biggest show in the world.
Over time, the Circus, the kingdom of horses, riders and clowns, was radically transformed according to the needs of the market, until it eventually fell into a period of crisis. We can only hope that it manages to survive and re-emerge in all its exciting glory. 

The marquee in the false ceiling of the Hall of the Fair is not only decorative, but also has a precise symbolic meaning: all of the travelling performers we have encountered in the Hall put on their shows using only their own human virtuosity, that is, their words and physical abilities: they did not yet have any mechanical aids.