THE ZINGANA
Ritual farce
3rd March 2025
Comunità di base delle Piagge, Centro Sociale “Il Pozzo”, Piazza Ilaria Alpi e Miran Hrovatin, 2
Firenze (IT)
ZINGARA or ZINGANA is a ritual, itinerant theatrical farce in which specific forms and characters of the Commedia dell’Arte are also found. Passed on orally in Valdisieve and Valdarno Superiore (provinces of Firenze and Arezzo), it was performed until the 1960s by groups of tenant farmers in San Piero a Strada, Masseto, Le Sieci, Doccia, Galiga, Santa Brigida, Altomena, Torri, Sarnese and Bombone. Linked to the end of Carnival is in genre characterised by a propitiatory wedding at the end of Winter. The reference text is a composition in rhyme and metre called ZINGARESCO: concatenated stanzas of three seven-syllable lines, the central two rhyming, plus a final line, quaternary or quinary, which rhymes with the first line of the following stanza. All the characters recite the text except the gypsy woman, called Mora, who sings it. The origins of this tradition are lost in the mists of time, although we know that it spread widely almost coincidentally with the publication of anti-Gypsy edicts following the arrival of the first Gypsy caravans in Italy (attested by written sources in 1422).
This particular theatrical genre and rite, which may have originated in Tuscany towards the end of the fifteenth century, probably overlapped with other pre-existing forms and, until the eighteenth century, was very popular in much of Italy at the time. Today it survives exclusively in memory or in practice in the Lucca region and in the area between Valdisieve and Valdarno di Sopra, where it shares many characteristics with the Befanata, another ritual form of begging that opens on the eve of Epiphany. The text used in this replica comes from the group in S. Piero a Strada, in the municipality of Pontassieve (Firenze), one of the last active in the area until the 1960s, but the same model was adopted by other groups in neighbouring towns: Masseto, Santa Brigida, Galiga. Here the tradition never ‘descended’ from the hills to the villages of the valley, and in fact there are stories of crowds on foot making their way up to the performance venues, usually in backyards or outdoor clearings, and sometimes in the large kitchens of country houses or in the large reserved rooms available in various farmhouses.
The La leggera group took up the tradition in 2014 and since then every year at Carnival in a different place brings the ZINGANA, from the original ‘ZINGANA’ composed by the Florentine poet Giovan Battista Fagiuoli, who published it in 1736 as the conclusion to the last volume of his Complete Comedies.
