Free My First Seven Years (Plus a Few More) by Dario Fo

but in an eccentric Lombard dialect, a speech which, continually enriched by new lexical additions, was transformed into an idiom without equal anywhere in the world. The valley of the mezarat had quite suddenly become a fantastic crucible of the most diverse, outlandish and often irreconcilable cultures, traditions, prejudices and mentalities, and yet, however much it might strain belief, there was never any manifestation of racism among those people. Certainly they made fun of each other, were even bitingly sarcastic over their respective pronunciations, stock phrases, gestures or modulation of guttural or sharp sounds, but never aggressively or malevolently so. It was genuinely funny to hear Germans, Spaniards, French or Poles railing at each other in a dialect that was already more than sufficiently abstruse and contorted.
    Porto Valtravaglia gave birth to an incredible new idiom: lizard became ritzòpora (from the Greek spoken in the Hellespont), shepherd became bergeròt, the German term tràmpen was used in the sense of clumsy, stappìch of cheat, sfulk of muddle, tacchinosa of street-walker, and so on.
    Obviously, as a boy I was not fully aware that in absorbing that strange melange of languages and dialects I was attending a unique university of communication, an experience which would afford me an otherwise unknown freedom to create expressive modules ad infinitum.
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    But let’s get back to our fabulatori, the story-tellers of the Valtravaglia who with their language and tales made an indelible mark on my future choices and on my way of judging events and characters in both fantasy and reality.
    The platforms where the performances unfolded, the idiosyncratic stages which varied with the trade of the individual fabulatore and the utility of the tale, were equally decisive.
    The fishermen chose the porches near the harbour. We children were their most enthusiastic audience. Fidanza, the headman of a crew, would get his assistants to line us all up in a semicircle to hold and stretch out the nets which needed to be mended. Not that he forced us to do this, perish the thought! It was an invitation accepted with good grace, indeed with alacrity, and paid for by the tales they told. I was especially fascinated by the elements of paradox in those stories, and even more by the spicing of the language with bizarre terms which produced in my mind unfamiliar images which I then struggled to absorb into my vocabulary. Often I did not grasp exactly the sense of the word-play, and asked them to repeat it … so I ended up laughing out of turn, to the annoyance of my more attentive companions.
    Beyond all doubt, my first teacher in the telling of tales was my grandfather Bristìn, but now I found myself attending a genuine masterclass for jesters, and I had the opportunity to study the most diverse techniques and forms of delivery.
    At this school, I learned the structure of the original dialect, which is something different from merely speaking dialect: above all I acquired the structure of a primordial, integral language which grants you the total liberty, at any moment, to invent expressions.
    The style of those fabulatori, story-tellers, was based on improvisation; as I have already mentioned, it was evident that their main concern was to adapt differing passages to a contingent reality. I had occasion to listen to the same story related in three or four different versions. The ability of the person recounting the story lay in his capacity to adapt it each time according to variations in events, including local incidents and laundry-room gossip. Every event, however unexpected, was immediately incorporated into the performance: an explosion caused by poachers, a shot from a hunter’s rifle, the ringing of church bells … everything was grist to their mills.
    And most of all, the story-tellers never lost sight of the moods and emotions of their listeners. If there was