Nobel Laureate and self-proclaimed jester Dario Fo kicks off Milan's first international clown festival Thursday.
The playwright-performer - awarded the 1997 Nobel Literature Prize for "emulating the jesters of the Middle Ages in scourging authority and upholding the dignity of the downtrodden" - will lead the opening procession of performers through his home town in a 'clown-mobile'.
The event will draw hundreds of clowns, comedians, poets, acrobats and other types of street performer to
Italy's business capital, as part of its carnival celebrations.
Organizers say it will be three days of "joy, culture and contemporary theatre".
The festival in the city's Isola quarter is self-financed - all the artists will perform twice or three times a day for free, fuelled only by the contributions collected in the hat at the end of the shows.
It is split into sections for professional artists and companies, emerging acts and debutants.
Two awards are up for grabs, the Jury Prize and the Audience Grand Prize, the winner of which will pocket 20% of all the cash raised at the festival events.
Organizers claim the aim is for "street theatre to flood the roads once again, to seize back the space and standing that it deserves, particularly in a big city that seems to have forsaken its human face".
Fo, 79, is perhaps best known for his 1970 play, Accidental Death of an Anarchist.
An earlier work, Archangels Don't Play Pinball (1959), was Italy's biggest theatre hit ever and led to a top-ranking TV show which was eventually pulled for political reasons. Fo was banned from Italian TV for 15 years along with his personal and professional partner Franca Rame, a leading Italian feminist raped by far-right thugs in the mid-70s.
The playwright also had long-running success with ever-changing versions of his Mistero Buffo, which combined medieval mystery play techniques with political satire.
Fo has played a leading role in preserving early commedia dell'arte stylistic models and their characteristic
freewheeling argot, 'grammelot'. Other important works include Can't Pay, Won't Pay (1974), The Pope and the Witch (1989) and The Devil with Boobs (1997).
His Nobel Prize win was met with dismay by the sections of the Italian political establishment and the Catholic Church, both victims of his satire. "A clown that climbs into the throne is something that sends people's heads spinning," Fo said after clinching the award.
Fo's plays have been performed in 70 countries and translated into 30 languages.
Last year he came top of a poll in which the Milanese were asked which cultural figure best represented their city, ranking ahead of ballerina Carla Fracci and author Umberto Eco.
In January the writer ran in the primaries to be the centre-left candidate in Milan's mayor elections, but lost
out to former Milan prefect Bruno Ferrante. The Milan Clown Festival website - ww.milanoclownfestival.tk - has an English-language section.
