Bartoccio from Pian del Tevere is the Perugia’s carnival mask, as Harlequin is the mask of Venice and Punchinello of Naples.

Bartoccio is a farmer who talks country rough dialect, who goes up to the town and brings every thing back at the primary substance of food, sex, life and death. He’s the burlesque type of the well-off rude countryman , rogue but ignorant, witty but coarse.

His stock-character comes from the “commedia dell’arte” and represents the critical mirror in which the town looks at herself. The mask of Bartoccio comes from the seventeenth century and is the favourite reference of the dialect Perugia’s satirical literature.

About it: “Bartocciate alla perugina, poesie in dialetto dal Seicento all’Ottocento” by L.M. Reale, Ed. Guerra, Perugia 1999, pp. 596.