A Further Foray into Italian Street Theater:
Considerations on Costume and Props

I’d run halfway across the centro storico to get to San Gregorio ai Muratori for their Friday evening Latin mass, and, naturally, discovered that I got their schedule wrong and I had an hour and a half to wait. I initially planned to walk back to the Architecture School and sit it out. Maybe have a page through the big picture book of photos of Pius XII I’d bought at the Libreria Editrice Vaticana that morning—it has, of all things, a Rockwellesque newspaper illustration of his Holiness shaving with an electric razor in the company of his pet canary. I have to admire a pope who has room for both that and a triple tiara in his iconographic repertoire.

Anyway, I was in the mood to waste time. I’d finished my latest paper and didn’t really have much in the way of work to do anyway that afternoon.

I didn’t get back until a full two hours later, and I ended up accidentally missing mass in the process after forgetting to wear my watch and discovering an untapped vein of early music CDs during my wander down the Corso, none of which I got around to actually purchasing.

In short, Italy had sucked me into its operatic streetscape again. It starts out slowly, as you stop by a bookstall you’d not seen before and the next thing you know you’re scoping out future gelato spots and admiring equally the lunatic window-displays and the sublime architecture. It’s a fantasy world. The fact that no Italian street clock even remotely agrees with the next—even when they’re within a few yards of each other—leaves you in a charmingly weird discrepancy in the space-time continuum when, at best, one can approximate a vague local time after taking the average of all those schizoid dials.

Anyway, it did start out with a bookstall. Actually a little encampment of them on a sidestreet leading towards the fashionable Via del Corso, the La Scala of Italian street comedy. I poked around, saw the leather spines of a two-volume set of the Opere Completa of Manzoni, and made my way around to the front of the stall. Soon, I was a couple booths down paging through antique proclamations from the Risorgiormento bearing the engraved coats of arms of Popes, Neapolitan kings and the odd cardinal or two. They were quite reasonably priced, actually, for papers dated 1861.

The selection of items was surprisingly heterogeneous. Antique medals, a small but select sampling of authentic junk. Then, more inexplicably, there were black-and-white photograph albums full of Lauren Bacall-ish blondes in cumbersome but classy long skirts, thick socks and extremely old-fashioned skiing kit. I can’t imagine skiing dressed like Kim Novak can be easy.

Other stalls had hundreds of old engravings, an inexplicable number of yellowing full-color newspaper pages showing Mussolini looking purposeful or signing treaties with everyone and their sister, belle-epoque French fashion illustrations, antique maps of an equally antique Italy, twenty-euro pages of Gregorian chant notation in black and red. Then there was a whole cart full of old lead soldiers of varying quality, including one or two half-decent Napoleonic bandsmen.

They also had, for no good reason, a diorama of a bunch of post-Anschluss Wehrmacht soldiers in field-grey breaking down one of the border crossings into Austria. I think it was based on a picture in a history book I once saw. Italians enjoy calling anything they dislike ‘Fascist,’ including, as Professor M. does, the Lazio football team. Given il Duce’s nonchalant guest-appearances here, I guess their contempt isn’t terribly systematic. Somehow, it doesn't surprise me terribly.

I decided to move on and filed away the location so I could come back when I had more cash on hand and a better reason to buy one of King Bomba’s last-ditch proclamations.

I decided I simply couldn’t go back to the studio after what I saw next. The German theme was coming back with a vengeance. Marching down Via del Corso was, not some Hitlerish scene of “all Germany marching uniformed in columns,” but something almost as terrifying and just as loud. A mobile version of Oktoberfest.

Really. A bunch of Italians, either smiling broadly or trying desperately not to smirk, were marching down the center of the street dressed in blue loden coats and extravagant St. Pauli girl-cum-Swiss Miss getups (with way too much eyeliner, I might note). They were ccompanied by an earsplittingly-loud brass band and a banner with an inscription in Fraktur something about Rome saluting Germany or beer or Bavaria, I’m not sure.

I'm still scratching my head about that.

I gawked after them for a while as they strode off towards Piazza del Popolo under the Teutonic eagle and Italic tricolor and saw I still had an hour to go until mass. So I wandered further in search of new and free entertainment, having a grand time all the while.

I ducked into some bookstores and music shops, checked out a few books on the Italian Army, found a Guillame de Machaut CD, the Morales Requiem for Philip II, some Alfonso el Sabio stuff, and a recording of sixteenth-century Lutheran hymns that looked interesting. I moved on though I decided to wait on buying anything.

I also got some of my fun, oddly enough, looking at the window displays. I’m not much of a window-shopper unless books, military uniforms or Cipriano de Rore CDs are involved, you must understand. When on field trips, the girls in the group stop and ooh and ahh over the semi-fetishistic shoes behind plate glass (they almost always wear sneakers anyway), my roommate and I stand on the sidelines, hands on pockets, and I wonder if I should say something about the Chicago Bears. Exactly what, I’m not sure, as I’m not even sure which sport they play. Lacrosse?

However, that parade of brightly-lit windows, installed into the old blocked-up arcades of palazzi, could have easily hold my attention for hours. I’m not sure why it’s so weirdly entertaining. I started out soberly enough, ducking into the wood-paneled narthexes of some of the nicer men’s shops and looking at the tasteful English tweed, keeping an eye out in case I saw a hat for the winter months.

I soon realized it was twice as entertaining (and much more of a time-waster) to glance at the female mannequins got up in odd skirts, blouses and scary pointy boots, behind the big glassed-in windows facing the Corso. Not only because their clothes were so radically different from the male sartorial sobriety I find tasteful but because I’m not wholly sure the outfits these fiberglass beauties were wearing really counts as clothing so much as expensive Halloween costumes.

I don’t think I’ve seen clothes this odd since high school. Trust me, nobody dresses weirder than teenage American girls.

The big window displays are the modern equivalent of the street shrines you see everywhere in Rome. Spain, hanging on to some shred of her Catholicism, still has her wooden-faced images of Our Lady with horsehair locks and stiff pearl-encrusted dresses. Secularized Italy now has a cult dedicated to these carefully-designed, hyperreal women in black. They're all pale as Ostrogoths, with uniformly bee-stung fiberglass lips, painted permanent makeup and chocolate-brown wigs either cropped short or extravagantly hair-sprayed into baroque disarray.

At least Spain’s Virgins smile or weep. I don’t think whoever pulled these Eves from the side of an Adam with painted white teeth could give them much more than the ability to purse their lips and stare as blankly as runway models. Opera (and street theater) doesn’t require much from its heroines but look decent in costume and sing. They’ve got fifty percent already, and it's the tricky bit that most beefy sopranos can't pull off.

It’s weirdly entertaining. Mannequins in the U.S. all seem to be headless diagrams wearing elegantly sober plaid, while these ladies remind me nothing so much as one of those Victorian ethnographic tableaux mortes that still crop up in museums. Two hundred years from now, historians will try to reconstruct daily life in Rome and, going only on clothing catalogues, all the women will be in leather with an excessive number of buckles and grommets and straps, topped off with shellacked snow-blonde hair. Children will have as much fun with that as making fun of Marie-Antoinette's skyscraper wigs.

Their clothing doesn’t resemble what’s worn on the street. That’s weird in a different way; the difference in Italy between runway and street isn't one of degree but just...well... It’s hard to say. You see, most of the insane ensembles you see in the per donne boutiques are actually more sober compared to some of the extravaganzas I’ve seen roaming the streets. Viz: High heels with put-your-eye-out pointed toes, baggy nylon trousers that look like army fatigues for space-age Zouaves, schoolgirlish punk regalia, insane Goth getups, miniscule tweed skirts, plaid ties (on women, let me remind you), silver Buck Rogers jackboots, skintight riding breeches in urban black-grey camoflage, translucent gauze mock-turtlenecks that leave little to the imagination, and anything in white pleather.

This is a place where a blood-red leather jacket is about as demure as an argyle cardigan. I even once saw a stumpy grey-haired woman dressed in what can only be described as a modest leather skirt, the kind of thing Carrie-Ann "Kick the Snot out of Agent Smith" Moss would wear if she were a Catholic nerd. Boggles the mind.

Sometimes it cuts the other way, and modesty almost reaches the extremes of fashion. The other day, walking past Sant’ Andrea I saw a demure, sharp-featured young woman of almost translucent fairness in simple white and beige almost as pale as her skin. Her well-cut pleated skirt, her pale hose and low-heeled blue-black shoes made her look nothing so much as a serenely well-bred nine-year-old waiting in line for her first Communion. Huh.

Nobody puts on clothes around here. Believe me, they’re costumes. It’s only when you realize this that the reasoning behind the seemingly-cumbersome clerical cassocks make sense. You sometimes see a Roman seminarian dashing through the streets in a full black soutaine, the tassels of his fascia fluttering at one side. The standard Jesuit plaid button-down of his American counterparts simply would not work in this context. He is trying to be heard over all the theatrical, sartorial shouting. Same goes with this The Matrix-goes-skiing women's clothing (what is it with Italians and this skiing thing?) that seems to be the latest thing around here. About the only thing that will hold its own against it is Sister Bertrille’s headgear…or a modest creature virtually dressed in her first communion clothes.

With so much competition, it takes a lot to get the Church noticed around here. When surrounded by palazzi, something as grandiose as the baroque SS. Ambrogio e Carlo in the Corso is only as useful as clearing one’s throat. It takes a stage-set the size of St. Peter’s to grab the attention of an actor involved in the comic tragedy or tragicomedy of the hilariously self-absorbed Italian streetscape.

It's better than anything you'll see in the theater, believe me.