Introduction

This chapter outlines the main features that characterised rural life as well as how, through changes brought about by modernity, its rural population has shifted its social positioning while maintaining its basic orientation. In the Janus-faced manner of Montepulciano it looks both backwards and forwards. It completes a picture related to the Montepulciano district, while at the same time introducing themes such as the history of sharecropping, class issues and conflicting views on revival of popular traditions that are fundamental to any understanding of the next festival to be explored. It links back to Montepulciano's identity, gives more background to key themes and clarifies some more recent history relevant to debates surrounding Bruscello and Bravio as well as the next and final event under scrutiny: the Teatro Povero di Monticchiello. By charting some of the more recent past, it traces some of the reasons that may have led to the inception both of the Bravio and of Monticchiello's theatre.

The chapter begins with an overview of the themes to be addressed within it and their relevance to festivals and communities in question, before moving into a deeper outline of each. It traces a brief history of 400 years of the medieval agrarian practice known as sharecropping, giving particular attention to its social aspects in the 1800s and its demise under the combined pressures of industrialisation and proliferation of socialist ideas leading to political unrest. It then moves to an outline of the political climate of the 1970s in the Montepulciano district.