Italy in winter

[vconaway]

I am a musician (hammered dulcimer) and I did some busking in Italy this past summer. I'm looking at performing there again this coming January-February, and was wondering what the outlook is compared to the high season.

I remember that on a January vacation in Florence there were a number of musicians street performing so there must be some potential. Also, when I was street performing this summer my audience was mainly locals, which should help when there aren't as many tourists. One friend told me that "you won't make any money, but you won't starve" which is really all I'm looking for :-)

I'm looking at some of the medium-sized cities (Florence, Verona, Genova, Padova) rather than the huge ones, and I'll probably spend some time in Sicily. Any feedback would be appreciated!

-Vince Conaway

[gav]

tomorrow I'll be going to a street music festival in Serbia and meeting with a number of street musicians that work in Italy.
I'll ask around for you and let you know what they say.

[gaelyn]

ROMA.

If you can manage to hop over a little earlier (Christmas) Piazza Navonna is the place to be.

Unless you have European citizenship or a work permit Venice will be strait out and all the good spots are taken anyways.

If you're looking for an enjoyable time and making enough money to eat while you're there you'd fair pretty well in Florence (a beautiful city by night, not so much day).

However if you're looking for a sea of drunken stupor (and some of the nicest buskers you've ever met) then Rome is the place to go to to pull in some cash.

There's just one catch with Italy. As stated earlier you're supposed to be a European citizen or have a work permit to busk. However the Polizia Burgese (plain clothes cops) who are in charge of such matters seldom harass you unless your juggling flaming infants over a pool of alligators while being shot out of a cannon to land in a bottle of wine-- and then only if you spill the wine.

[vconaway]

Thanks gaelyn, you were totally right!

After posting my question I took a four month busking tour of Italy from January 11-May 14, so now I have some concrete answers to my question. The trip went very well overall, and I wanted to share some details with people here who have been so helpful.

Please keep in mind that I’m a musician performing acoustically (I’m a hammered dulcimer player), so I probably get more leeway from the powers-that-be than other buskers might. It also shapes my evaluation of pitches. I was selling CDs, which can complicate things sometimes, so again your mileage may vary. These are all generalities, but if you’d like more details feel free to email me.

Rome:

In Rome the rules are hard to follow – they depend more on the opinion of the nearest polizia than any actual rules I could discern. While performing on Piazza Navona I was told at various times conflicting hours of allowable busking when I was occasionally asked to leave, and yet had a number of performances there that passed without incident. When I was asked to leave one pitch I usually just wandered to another one to finish the amount of busking I had planned. One cop I talked to said that there was a two hour maximum on any pitch, but since I never performed that long in one place I don’t know how much it is enforced. I was lectured twice (in five weeks overall) for selling CDs, but heard very little about it. As a spectator, fire acts at Santa Maria in Trastevere seemed to do well.

Genoa:

A group of fire-jugglers with what I consider an excessively aggressive hat-pass (two people would thrust hats into the faces of every passerby while the rest of the troupe performed) told me that “in Genova the cops don’t care”. That was pretty much my experience while there. The rule seems to be one hour maximum on pitches – I was asked to move on by some polizia who thought I was another busker who had been overstaying her welcome on a pitch (since she was the other dulcimer player in town that week I can understand the confusion) but were very apologetic once I cleared up the mistaken identity (Russian girl vs American male made a difference). That was a rule that I was told on other occasions as well, though, so it might be fairly vigorously enforced.

Florence:

Don’t even bother, in my opinion. Like Venice, the rules are pages and pages of regulations about where you can perform (not neighborhoods, like in other cities, but addresses) and when (8-10pm, for example, in the case of musicians). Even then there are no guarantees – I was asked to leave the Ponte Vecchio even though I was performing on an officially sanctioned pitch at an allowed time (no permit questions were asked, it was simply “move along”).

The permit process is Byzantine, of course, but again didn’t seem to have much practical effect. I’ve seen a number of street corner buskers throughout the city, but from what I could tell they were all pretty much hiding from the cops. This is difficult, because in the past year they’ve seriously beefed up the police presence in tourist areas, stationing cars with two cops in a number of places I hadn’t seen them before.

Perugia:

The cops were very cool, no problems. There are, however, only two or three good pitches in the entire city, and only a comparatively narrow window of time when the busking is good (or at least was good for me). Also, the city is on the top of a high hill and so is extremely cold and windy even when the surrounding areas are pleasant. In July this might be nice – in March it wasn’t.

Brescia:

The cops were fine; I was asked to move along because of a complaint (apparently someone found me distracting while working upstairs near one of my pitches), but the cop involved was extremely polite. Like Perugia, however, there is only one street that was really good for me (though a couple piazze looked promising for circle shows), though unlike Perugia there were several times of day when I did well.

Ferrara:

I’m still not sure if busking was OK in Ferrara or if I just never got caught. There were a few other musicians in town but most didn’t play very much. I was never asked to leave a pitch, but I never had a patrolling cop walk past me either. I didn’t perform as much here as elsewhere because of an attack of the flu, so it’s tricky to say.

Modena:

The first day I was in Modena there was a group of South American “Indian” performers, which is always a good sign. Since they perform amplified, sell merchandise, and tend to squat on pitches they’re a royal pain in the ass to share a city with, but the fact that they’re allowed to continue is usually a good sign regarding local regulations. Modena wasn’t especially good to me, but I didn’t have any problems either.

Parma:

For some reason Parma shuts down on Thursdays, so traffic is nonexistent. This seems to be generally true of Romagna, because I saw it in Bologna as well. I wasn’t doing so hot there, so when I got hassled by a cop for selling CDs without a permit (although she was very polite and informative about how to obtain one) I just left town.

Bologna:

I only spent a day in Bologna, which seemed promising, but while I wasn’t thrown off a pitch I did follow two patrolling cops as they threw several other musicians off theirs. I learned that just because the city has 40 km of covered walkways and people are dry as they walk by on a rainy day doesn’t mean they’ll stop to listen. Rain days just suck.

I hope this can be helpful to others, happy busking!

Vince

[vconaway]

I just got back from a winter busking tour in Italy, over Christmas and into the New Year. Rome at Christmas was pretty good, but the polizia was a bit more finicky than they've been during my previous stints. Naples at New Year's was great fun, and Epiphany/Twelfth Night (6 Jan) was particularly good busking. The street rabble is a bit obnoxious though, and it's the only place I've ever seen where the living statues all chain their hats to their pedestals. Cosenza, in Calabria, is a bustling university town that treated me quite well on the one day I had the weather to perform. Catania, in Sicily, was also pretty good, but the pitches were a bit odd; aside from one piazza, the main street is "restricted" traffic rather than fully pedestrian.

[Kate Awesome]

HAHA. I'm in Italy right now, just finished the Milano Clown Festival (which was a bust... I'm REALLY regretting not working the Vancouver Olympics in favour of this..)

I've toured through Italy before doing living statue; my advice is to tour through the smaller towns during the festival season and work those instead of the bigger cities. More appreciative crowds and can be really good money. I toured through the north and had a wonderful time. Plus, everyone gives you free wine!