PAST are the splendid pageants of the Medici, nor do the floors of Castel San Angelo remember the caress of the winged feet of choral dancers. The classic ballet, heir of the dances and masques of courts, preserves their stately charm; while their choreographic wit lives on in dances that are at once their ancestors and their survivors. An intermediate generation of dances represented the day of a society cultivated to artificiality. The dances of the people, on the contrary, are rooted in the soil and cared for by wholesome tradition. Including, as they do, many of the steps from which the ballet was derived, there is material for interesting speculation in their continued vigour.
In the Forlana of Venice, with its old-fashioned steps, is found a delicate mimetic synopsis of the world-old tale of the young wife, the elderly husband, and the dashing interloper; the theme immortalised by the pen of Boccaccio, in his collection of the stories that passed the time during the ten days when the court exiled itself in the hills to avoid a pestilence in Florence. The accompanying illustrations of the dance have the benefit of the knowledge of two graduates of the academy of la Scala, both children of teachers in that institution: Madame Saracco-Brignole and Stephen Mascagni. Both are enthusiastic performers of their country’s character dances; Mascagni, indeed, with his wife as
