The Crocchio Goliardi, spent at an altitude of 100
PISA. 1921 in Pisa was a year full of important events. The Pisa Sporting Club touches on its first and only championship in history, the maestro is assassinated Carlo Cameo in via Contessa Matilde and the Crocchio Goliardi Spesierati is born. The centenary of the CGS has passed on the sly due to the well-known pandemic events, but it is necessary to remember a century of life of one of the oldest student associations in Italy. The student spirit at that time was already a serious thing for the young Pisans and, after the horrors of the First World War, the twenties and thirties were a period of great youthful fervor.
It can be said that the whole city lived moments of real exaltation together with the students, with their typical activities: jokes, operettas, “festissime” and the edition of single numbers. In 1919, around the musician Beppe Del Genovese, a first group of students was born, from the name Svicat (Si Va In C… A Tutti). The chronicles still tell that on the evening of January 6, 1921, in a house in Via Santa Caterina in Pisa, about thirty students met and decided to come together in association. The choice of the name, quite banal, was conditioned by a request for a story Francesco Del Guasta, who attended (with little success) the Physics lessons of the then famous Professor Puccianti: “Call it as you like, as long as the initials are Cgs like Centimeter, Gram, Second!”. That is the measurement system used in applied sciences, before international standards were established.
Also left by the founders, it is said that a first was that of “Circolo Goliardi Spensierati”, which, however, was not convinced by most of the boys. Renato Bernardini then propose “Circolo” with “Crocchio” and the CGS thus had its nice and historical appellation.
The song “Bimbe di Pisa” (published with the title of Bimbe d’Italia) by the first president Beppe Del Genovese was adopted as the anthem. In the first years of life, between the two wars, the Crocchio was the engine of all the goliardic initiatives in Pisa, including theatrical parodies: the first official release was in the same 1921, or an amazing “Goodbye Youth” at the Theater New from Ponsacco. Thus the vein of the goliardic theater in the Pisan vernacular which had had its beginnings in 1893 with the “Francesca da Rimini” and in 1904 with the “Pia de ‘Tolomei” took up again.
The representation of the famous “operettas”, within the CGS, the birth of a real theater company, the famous Brigade of Doctors of Crocchio, which debuted in 1926 with the remaking of the “Francesca” over thirty years earlier. The successes collected around Italy convinced the Brigade to become autonomous from the Crocchio, although many of the protagonists actors coincide in fact with the elders of the CGS.
A very curious and significant fact, the staging of Francesca da Rimini, in addition to marking the birth of the Pisan goliardic theater (1893) and of the Crocchio Brigade (1926), should mark every periodic resurrection of the Brigade of Doctors and of the Crocchio Goliardi Spesierati , thus rising as a symbol of the passing of the baton between the different generations, which took place in the years 1933, 1945, 1990 and 2001. The performers of that romantic and distant season, in addition to the aforementioned Del Genovese, were Giulio Pinori, Aldo Podestà, Beppe Chiellini, Cecco Patti and a young man Indro Montanelli. Perhaps the most beautiful season of the Pisan student spirit was interrupted again due to the war events. When civil and cultural life resumed, the events of the Doctors’ Brigade and the CGS coincided. Towards the mid-fifties, with the crisis of the traditional student spirit, Crocchio stepped aside and the Brigade devoted itself with great success to the new genre of popular comedy. Led mainly by Aldo Potestà, it was made famous until the 1980s by the couple Giancarlo Peluso And Ato Davini.
But the fire always smolders and, after countless convivial and nostalgic occasions, finally in 1990 it resumed the tradition of “operettas” in grand style, with a legendary Francesca da Rimini at the Verdi Theater. Then it was the turn of Operation Troy (1991), Nero (1992), The key of the Bastille (1993) and many others. These successes have stimulated a new group of young people (to which the writer also belongs) to collect the glorious witness of the goliardic theater. Captained by Lorenzo Gremigni and initially run in the heart of the theater group “Il Portone”, the current Crocchio was reborn. Since 2001, with a renewed “Francesca da Rimini” and with new successes (La Traviata, Nerone, Otello), the CGS has come to blow out its hundred goliardic candles. Even if there has not yet been an opportunity for a meeting in the “old way”, next May 31, at the Teatro Verdi in Pisa, the parody “Otello, er moro di Pisa” will be staged. We are waiting for you!
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