A STROLL IN SHAKESPEARE’S MILAN. A THEATRICAL PROMENADE
Fragments of Shakespeare’s The Tempest retold in historic Milan.
by Maggie Rose
CAST
American actor, Joe Falocco as Prospero, Duke of Milan and Trinculo, a Neapolitan Jester
When and Where
7 June at 10.30am and 8 June at 5pm
Meeting point in front of the main entrance of the Castello Sforzesco- Running time: approx. 90 mins.
WRITE TO INFO@ENGLISHTHEATREMILAN.ORG TO BOOK A PLACE. Free entrance. Donation welcome. Places are limited.
American actor Joe Falocco will play Prospero and Trinculo
Joe Falocco has worked as an actor at the North Carolina, Oklahoma, Texas, Wisconsin, and Kentucky Shakespeare Festivals. He also spent a year on tour with the Shenandoah Shakespeare Express. Italian credits include Ferdinando in Goldoni’s Le avventure della villeggiatura for Teatro Il Punto in Florence and Tenente in the Scuola di Polizia Stunt Spectacular at Mirabilandia. Dr. Falocco is a Professor of English at Texas State University. He is the author of Reimagining Shakespeare’s Playhouse: Early Modern Staging Conventions in the Twentieth Century (Boydell and Brewer Ltd., 2010) along with articles in several major journals including Shakespeare Bulletin.
SHAKESPEARE AND ITALY
For thirteen of his plays, almost a third of the entire canon, Shakespeare created primary or secondary settings in different parts of Italy. The Merchant of Venice and Othello have Venice as a backdrop, Romeo and Juliet, Verona and Mantua, Taming of the Shrew, Padua. Films, stage productions, novels and short stories have conjured up vivid pictures of these cities in our collective imagination. Orson Welles’s Othello, Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet, and Al Pacino’s The Merchant of Venice, spring to mind, making us feel that we have visited these places even though we have never been there.
MILAN IN SHAKESPEARE’S PLAYS
Compared to Venice, Verona and Padua, Milan can be said to be underrepresented, even if scenes of Two Gentlemen of Verona are set in Milan, and early in The Tempest Prospero transports us to Milan, thanks to the harrowing tale he relates to his daughter, Princess Miranda. Twelve years earlier, Prospero had been ousted from his position of Duke of Milan by his brother Antonio. In his story Milan turns into a place, where villainy is rife, but it is also an opulent city; Prospero and Miranda possessed a large dwelling, with many servants, where Prospero studied the liberal arts, cultivating a love of magic and books.
In all probability, Shakespeare never visited Italy, so he must have gleaned his knowledge from books, Italian travellers to London and from English travellers returning from Italy. However, one thing is certain: in 1609 when he wrote the play, Shakespeare was interested in Milan – he mentions it 22 times. Moreover, he imagined the city ruled by a Duke (even if by 1609- Milan was occupied by the Spanish and had a Spanish governor). He was also aware of the sometimes conflictual, political relationship between Milan and Naples (the latter is mentioned 19 times, and the adjective, ‘Neapolitan’ once). He likewise created the Neapolitan figures of King Alonso of Naples, Prince Ferdinand, his son, Sebastian, Alonso’s brother, Stephano, a butler, and Trinculo, a court jester. Shakespeare probably knew that Milan, while not on the coast, had a system of waterways which allowed one to sail from the heart of the city to the sea. He also knew that Milan was a walled city, since Prospero mentions being rushed through a city gate at midnight.
A STROLL IN SHAKESPERE’S MILAN. A THEATRICAL PROMENADE
In creating this Shakespeare stroll, I consider possible links between Shakespeare and important historical Milanese places and figures. This theatrical promenade takes in some of the key places that might have inspired Shakespeare in his writing of The Tempest – Castello Sforzesco, the old Ambrosiana library, the city gate at the beginning of Corso di Porta Ticinese and Milan’s port. It also points to some historic figures who might have proved inspirational, such as the celebrated Duke Ludovico Sforza, Prospero Visconti, a direct descendent of the Visconti family and a highly cultivated man and Federico Borromeo, Archbishop of Milan, as well as a huge bibliophile and art collector
Joe Falocco, who will play Prospero and Trinculo on 7 and 8 June, writes:
Shakespearean performance has fallen on hard times. For centuries, the Bard’s works were a staple of the theatrical repertory. That is no longer the case (at least in the United States). Every month, another “Shakespeare Theatre” closes its doors. Many of those that remain totter on the edge of bankruptcy; and the few who continue to thrive do so by producing less and less of the eponymous playwright’s work. One bright spot within this otherwise bleak landscape has been the recent success of “site-specific” adaptations. Broadly defined, this term refers to performances that take place outside of traditional modern theatre spaces. In the United Kingdom, a subset of site-specific performance focuses on historical locations linked to Shakespeare’s biography. There has also been a movement in Italy to stage site-specific Shakespeare in some of the venues where his plays are set. In 2016, for instance, Compagnia de’ Colombari staged an adaptation of The Merchant of Venice to mark the 500th anniversary of that city’s Ghetto. While teaching in Padua in 2024, I took students to experience “Shakespeare Tours” of Venice, Verona, and Padua. During each of these, historian Ornella Naccari led the group to locations represented in Shakespeare’s plays and explained their significance. Then, actors from Verona’s Casa Shakespeare Theatre performed scenes from the works in question at these same historic sites. This experience led me to approach English Theatre Milan about a collaboration along similar lines. In 2026, Ornella and I will be leading a workshop on this theme at the World Shakespeare Congress in Verona.
