TePoTraTos Scenes from the Traditional Tuscan Popular Theater

The TePoTraTos Museum (Scenes from the Traditional Tuscan Popular Theater) of Monticchiello is an expression of the over forty-year experience of the Poor Theater to which the community of inhabitants has given life since 1967 and which has made peasant civilization one of the essential nodes of its dramaturgy. Being a venue where the experience of traditional popular theater (handed down from generation to generation and linked to the seasons) is told, the entire structure moves away from the usual schemes of museum installations: the TePoTraTos is suspended halfway between museum and theatrical performance and of the show also reproduces the micro-variations in the progress of the visit, which can change in the visitor's experience for some details, just as the theatrical representation is never perfectly equal to itself. The path, set up inside an ancient eighteenth-century barn inside the village, allows the visitor-spectator to perceive emotions immersed in a communicative universe made up of noises, voices, fragments of dialogues, objects, images that recall the peasant world.

Symbolically, even the choice of the exhibition space is a reappropriation of a heritage linked to the community: the granary, a place where the landowner once kept the fruit of collective work, returns to the community and today preserves the heritage of his memory. Not a museum on the Teatro Povero, but a museum of the Teatro Povero: through scenes and images of traditional Tuscan theater, it offers a tribute to peasant and sharecropping civilization, its entertainment, its world of simple and pure popular poetry.