Street Singers in Italian Renaissance Urban Culture and Communication

ABSTRACT Street singers were crucial figures in Italian Renaissance urban culture, mediating between printed, written and oral forms of communication. Performing in the central piazza, they offered entertainment, news, satire and commentary on current events to heterogeneous publics. But as the communicative capacities of the singers reached their peak, increasingly their presence in the city was seen as threatening and disruptive. The struggle for control of the piazza became particularly bitter in the later sixteenth century when civic and ecclesiastical authorities strove to render public urban spaces more orderly and magnificent and to police the borders between sacred and profane spaces, times and ideas.