Giulio Pasquati, from Padua, stage name Pantalone, and Girolamo Salimbeni, from Florence, stage name Piombino, are two actors from the famous Comedians Gelosi company, active and applauded throughout Europe between the 16th and 17th centuries. They are alive by a miracle. They go on stage to tell how they escaped the gallows thanks to Don Quixote, Sancho Panza, but above all thanks to the audience. The adventures of one of the most famous comic couples in the history of literature begin with the last wish of those condemned to death, filtered by the creativity of the two acrobats who struggle in an attempt to postpone the execution, between windmills and armies of sheep. And if they don’t remember the story perfectly, well, it doesn’t matter, they improvise on the theme of love and hunger, of the impossible dream, of literary hyperbole, of freedom of thought and satire with “the only limit: the sky” as Cervantes would say.
A show about the audience, for the audience and with the audience, because it is the latter that will have the task of saving the two actors from death… of saving the theater. We too, actors behind the “actor characters” have drawn with absolute freedom from that extraordinary container that is Don Quixote, rehashing it in a Tuscan-Venetian seasoned with Emilianisms and Frenchisms and taking the permission to “pull by the jacket” authors such as Leopardi, Pulci, Ruzzante, Dante, De la Barca, Shakespeare and many others.
