The spirit of Prato, a very particular version of the Tuscan spirit, has produced over the years an extraordinary flowering of comedians: the comedy schools have been (and in part are) the people's houses, the street, the family, the work in the factory or in the fields . If you really had to look for the symbolic place of Prato's comedy, the first that comes to mind is the club 'L'unione' in Vergaio, where Roberto Benigni has breathed that popular culture since childhood, which, together with talent, is at the origin of his comedy and his culture and where many scenes of the film were shot which can be considered the 'manifesto' of our comedy (but one would also say of our popular culture): 'Berlinguer ti voglio bene' by Giuseppe Bertolucci (1977). In that mythical film, alongside the protagonist Roberto Benigni, some of the protagonists of that extraordinary comic season play, from Carlo Monni to Donato Sannini to Mario Pachi.
Everyone or almost everyone knows Roberto Benigni and Francesco Nuti. Few people know of the thousand Benigni and Nuti scattered among the villages of the plains or hills of Prato, of that widespread humor that is the humus from which a famous comedian emerges every now and then. But in Vergaio some of them know each other, they are the friends of youth so many times remembered by Benigni: Vasco Valentini, Valeriano Biagioni for his friends Riccardo, Vasco Rossi, Micheli, Renzone (also known as Renzo Fabbri), the great Franco Casaglieri passed away the last day of 2015, but also, a little younger, Massimo Antichi, also from Vergaio.
Francesco Nuti, (whose 1982 film, 'Madonna che silenzio c'è stasera', also remains, alongside Benigni's 'Berlinguer', the masterpiece of the comic soul of this city) director and actor grew up at the' school of comedy and life of a people's house, that of Narnali.