Shakespeare was from Puglia and played in Galatina (true story)

I’ll tell you a story. True, documented and serious. The greatest scholars (including English ones) agree that William Shakespeare cannot be the son of the English tanner John Shakespeare from Stratford-Upon-Avon, a town in central England.

His name does not appear in the most important registers of the city. His father was illiterate. For over seven years his tracks are lost. He is found in London as a horse keeper in a theater in the center. And suddenly, a simple boy, who stopped studying at the age of 12, begins to write sonnets, tragedies and to fill the English vocabulary with thousands of new entries. No one believes this story anymore, except the thousands of tourists who visit the alleged birthplace of Shakespeare, finding a humble house, no books and little imagination all around.

Although not a single original writing has ever been found, nor a book that belonged to him, for more than three centuries Shakespeare's English origin has never been questioned. The first to do so, at the beginning of the twentieth century, was an Italian journalist, Santi Paladino (1902-1981), who found by chance in his father's library an ancient book, entitled Second Fruits and signed by a certain Michel Agnolo Florio.

Reading it, Paladino discovered that many sentences in that book were identical to those in Shakespeare's works. Was it plagiarism? Impossible: that book had been printed in 1549, about 50 years before the appearance of Shakespeare's works, in fact before the poet's birth (1564). So?

The journalist Paladino began to investigate and discovered that Michelangelo Florio was none other than the son of the doctor Giovanni Florio and the noblewoman Guglielma Crollalanza, born in Messina and then fled to Treviso with his family, of Jewish origin and Calvinist religion, to escape the religious persecution of the Inquisition (Sicily was then under Spain).

The young Michelangelo Florio studied in Venice, Padua and Mantua; he travelled extensively, visiting Denmark, Greece, Spain and Austria, and became a highly cultured humanist, sought after as a tutor by the richest families in Europe. Thanks to his friendship with Giordano Bruno, who had good relations with the Earls of Pembroke and Southampton, in 1588 Michelangelo Florio reached London, where he was hired as a tutor of Italian and Latin to the future Queen Elizabeth.

Michelangelo Florio, to erase his surname as a fugitive Calvinist, had decided to call himself Shakespeare by translating his mother's surname and name (Guglielma Crollalanza) into English: shake means to agitate, to shake; spear means to launch. The name Guglielma becomes William.

How could the son of an illiterate glover possess the immense classical culture that Shakespeare demonstrates in his works? How could he so faithfully describe the places and customs of the Italian cities in which many of his plays are set? In fact, more than a third (15) of Shakespeare's 37 plays are set in Italy. In Hamlet, the surnames of two Danish students, Rosencrantz and Guilderstern, who were Florio's fellow students at the University of Padua, appear. Also in Hamlet, we find numerous proverbs published by Florio in his previous Italian book I secondi frutti. In The Merchant of Venice, the Bard reveals a knowledge of the Venetian legislation of the time, completely unknown in London.

Much Ado About Nothing is the English translation of a youthful comedy by Florio (Tantu traficu ppi nenti). In the same comedy, a protagonist comes out with a line ('Mizzeca, eccellenza!') that only a Sicilian could know. And, as it happens, Antony and Cleopatra is set in Messina, Florio's hometown.

At this point the mystery thickens. A young scholar from Salento, Raimondo Rodia, claims that the Florio family, fleeing from Messina, and before reaching Treviso, landed in Salento, in Galatina, replacing a local family, the Vignola, for security reasons.

According to the scholar, the choice of Galatina would not be accidental. The dialects of Lecce and Messina are very similar to each other and the commercial ties between Salento and Sicily at the end of the 16th century were very close.

With the complicity of the Vignola, they use the Crollalanza coat of arms. This coat of arms is located in Piazza Vecchia in Galatina. Incredible but true, it is the same coat of arms of the ancient Messina family of the Crollalanza, expatriates and in search of other names to escape the tight grip of religious persecution at the end of the 16th century.

Before arriving in Treviso and then studying in Padua, perhaps the young Michelangelo played with toy soldiers in the beautiful old square of Galatina. And who knows if he identified more with the deeds of the Roman Caesar or those of the Scottish king Macbeth…