For me Piazza Signoria is the most beautiful city square in the world. The Palazzio Vecchio commanding the square is maybe my favorite palace. It’s medieval, from the 13th century, most of the other building around the square are
from the Renaissance times 300 years later. The art in front of the Palazzio is pretty good, a couple of the greatest works of a guy called Michelangelo, the Neptune fountain and the David. They are full sized replicas now, but that's’ where the originals lived for their first four centuries. Plus Perseus beheading Medusa by Cellini and a bunch of other 15 foot tall marble statues of rape and pillage from Roman and Renaissance times.
Palazzo Vecchio
I first came here as a street juggler in 1986. I was living in Paris, traveling by myself in summer, my show in a small suitcase, 3 balls, 5 clubs, 3 boxes, two lassos, traveling to cities where someone had said the street performing was good, or just cities picked randomly from the map. “I bet there’s a lot of rich tourists there!”
Michelangelos’s Neptune Fountain
My first time here, awed by the beauty of the Piazza, I set up show in front of the Neptune fountain and quickly gathered a large circle. When I announced my name-- Davide Lichtenstein-- I imitated the Davide statue. When I asked the names of the four volunteers later, each one claimed to also be named Davide and imitated the statue. At the end of the show I received what is still the longest applause of my life. I went through all my applause schticks, invented a few new ones and then just stood there shocked.
The Pose
I realized later that it was square regulars that kept driving the minutes long applause in appreciation of a new show on the square that they loved. Piazza Signoria was street performers paradise then, the public was incredibly warm and appreciative.
I came back a year later with Cotton on the way back from the Gioca Fiesta in Sicily. I got to play the clown to Cotton’s straight man, which I always love. Cotton was a very talented 19 year old French/American juggler who grew up in Paris. He could joke with tourists in fluent French, English, Spanish, and German, and then make fun of all of them in Italian, a skill I have worked years to imitate but never equaled.
We had monstrous shows there. To vaunt our crowd control we would have a 5 club juggling contest for a beer, engineered to a draw, and then sit cross-legged on the ground in the middle of a circle of hundreds, drinking our beers and making jokes. Once I went to get pizza and beers in between shows and returned to see a mass of people filling much of the square. Damn I thought, there’s a marching band or a political demonstration or something, we won’t be able to do a show. As I approached I heard them chanting Da -- vi -- de and I as I came into the circle they burst into applause. Cotton had gathered the crowd, telling them he couldn’t start the show until his partner Davide returned. A big street circle always appears larger from the outside.
Rimini, Italy, somewhere 1986-87My mother met us there from the US and got to see my street performing success. We would fill a large shopping bag with 500, 1000, and 2000 lira notes, stuff them in hard and the fill it again, and then again, and then come home and pour it on the floor and pretend to swim through it. Banks wouldn’t usually change it for us, we had to go shop to shop to get it changed to larger bills. Nor would the Italian banks let us buy traveler checks or do any other business with us. At the end of the summer I would be carrying by entire summer savings to get through the Paris winter, about 2000 dollars worth in my person at all times, which makes swimming in practical when traveling on one’s own.
I need to emphasize to you young whipper-snapper street performers that this was before street amps, the show always done by voice only, our shows always fit in a small suitcase, and of course this was long before cell phones and internet, I rarely even had a phone in my Parisian hovels. I would meet other street performers and then not hear any word of them for a year or two (or for ever) until I ran into them in another city to great celebration.
Paris, 1985-87I came back to Florence 10 years late with my family, 1996 I think, midwinter. We had left our lodgings in crazy Ghys’s living room in Amsterdam, having never found a good place to live, and because I fancied living in Southern Europe. The four of us had been cramped in the tiny Peugeot J-9 camping van in the rain in Southern France, exploring and looking for a place to settle. James was five I think, and Lela was three. We stayed with a dancer performer couple we had met in an ancient farm house a half hour outside Florence, a beautiful stone farmhouse, but dark, cold and we still slept in the van.
I went in to Florence to do shows a few days. The street performer’s paradise was gone, it sours over years in almost every city. Performing in the Piazza Signoria was forbidden but it was still a pretty good place ot do winter shows and make precious winter money in front of the Duomo.
I wanted to stay and look for a place of our own but Lisa was unhappy. The dancer couple had two children smaller then ours. Lisa spoke no Italian, had no possibility of working on her writing and was cracking from isolation and baby overload, so we moved on.
We stumbled around for another couple of weeks to a gig in Switzerland, an abandoned, mildewed cottage above La Cote d’Azur, before finding an apartment in a large ghetto apartment complex in Port de Bouc, France, 45 minutes west of Marseilles. Our kids were the only non-Arab kids at their french speaking preschool. With a large apartment we were comfortable but isolated. My mother visited again and saw our not-quite-glamorous South of France street performing poverty. When we heard of a tiny apartment opening up in Amsterdam we raced back and spent the next year and a half based there.
12 years later, June 15, 2009. I’ve got 5 days off after a festival in a small town outside of Bologna, before three other small town festivals. After 10 years of not visiting Europe, as the kids became full-sized teenagers, I decided to start coming back. Now there are hundreds of large street theater festivals supporting thousands of acts from quality buskers to avant-garde theater to full sized circuses in the streets and everything in between. The first summer I took the family but now they can’t or don’t want to leave home for so long.
Last summer I set an away-from-family record: almost two months, playing tons of exciting festivals. This year I’m away 26 days, mostly in Italy, and the booking is a little thinner. I’m trying to do street-street shows in between gigs, which I haven’t done for many years, to help pay my little rental car. And once again, I’ve got no place to go really, my friends in Pennabilli won’t be back for a few days, so I head to Florence.
By the time I’m checked into a cheap room and get downtown there’s not much evening summer show time left. The Piazza Signoria is still gorgeous and full of tourists. There are 40 people circled up before I get my little sound system up, looks great, but the police shut me down right away. I set up 200 meters away in the main pedestrian street but it isn’t the same. It took 10 minutes to get the first person to stop, most of the show to get a real circle and 35 Euros in the hat, sweating, my props and hands are filthy. I go to eat my first meal of the day at 11:00 pm at a tourist hosteria. I felt a bit pissed off from a bad show, but fine, that means I get to be a plain tourist for a couple of days.
So today I toured the Palazzio Vecchio for the first time, walked the gorgeous streets, and sat in Piazza Signoria and wrote my 23 year history of Venice.
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