This is the first of two such short digressions that enable me to focus on a specific issue in a manner different from the chapters. In most of the cities of central and northern Italy a specific location, usually a piazza, became the traditional venue for poetic performance. By far the most famous and well-documented of these is Piazza San Martino in Florence, and it was arguably the city’s most famous soundscape. This essay explores the history and significance of this location in the heart of the Florentine wool district as a place that resisted control by special interests. Contrary to current perceptions, San Martino was not a low-brow venue for “wandering” hacks and mediocre poetry, but a prestigious and managed site where the full expressive range of Tuscan vernacular poetry was on display and in a continual state of forging and transmission.

This short chapter draws together the surviving evidence of the earliest practitioners of oral poetry in Italy, and lays the foundation for a number of themes that recur in later chapters: the rapidly shifting status of vernacular language, and the attendant shifts in the status and venues of those who, like these oral poets, made a living from it. Among the varied cast of characters that included poets of all ranks, were the prototypes of the professional canterini who mesmerized audiences in piazzas with dramatic renderings of narrative cantari, served the dynastic ambitions of the courts, and articulated the civic values of communal priors and captains. Depending on whether the historical witnesses were ecclesiastical (Salimbene de Adam, Thomas Aquinas) or secular (Giovanni da Viterbo, Lovato de’ Lovati), these early civic performers were regarded with varying degrees of suspicion, condescension, fascination, and admiration.