‘Poverty Makes Me Invisible’: Street Singers and Hard Times in Italian Renaissance Cities

Throughout the Renaissance, there was a long tradition of popular street performance concerning poverty. Sometimes the singer lamented his own hardship; sometimes he voiced the plight of the poor in general. In the sixteenth century, in the face of dearth and economic decline, a number of such works were printed in cheap pamphlets, sometimes commissioned by the performer himself to sell after his show to the public assembled in the piazza or street. This article examines how such themes were expressed in oral and printed forms by looking at a number of popular works from this period that commented on or complained about the growing inequality of Italian society, the careless prodigality of the rich and the suffering of the poor.