The Rame Family Theatre through Archival Sources

The Rame family, the birthplace of actress and playwright Franca Rame, was an itinerant company of actors active between the 19^th and 20^th century in Northern Italy. Initially directed by the puppeteer Pio Rame, the company, in its early days, devoted itself mainly to figure theatre, later moving on, under the direction of Domenico Rame – Pio’s son and Franca’s father –, to theatre in person. The Rame family proposed a vast repertoire that, among other things, included figure theatre classics, stories from the Bible, adaptations from opera and novels, mainly Italian and French, and shows about historical events and characters. Therefore, the Rame family is an emblematic example of those tour companies that brought theatre to small provincial towns, ranging, in its case, from Piedmont to Lombardy, Emilia-Romagna, and Veneto. The paper therefore aims to briefly retrace the most important stages in the company’s history, based on the surviving archive documents, which include scripts, canovacci, registers, administrative acts and much more. It is thus possible, on the one hand, to reconstruct the main junctions of a fundamental chapter in the history of Italian theatre, and on the other, to enhance the company’s inestimable documentary heritage, which, thanks to Franca Rame, has been preserved to this day.