Teatro del Sale is the place that Maria Cassi created with her husband Fabio Picchi so that it would be a sort of large 'backroom' in which to carry on their never-ending project: to propose, through art, culture and cuisine, a certain idea of life.

That extraordinary idea of life, which you can still breathe today among the creaking wood and the cheerfulness of the diners, in the talent of the artists and in the sociability of a community that meets.

As president and artistic director of Circo-lo, Maria curates a busy programme of music, dance and theatre involving artists from different disciplines and backgrounds.
And when she is not on the road, she herself performs here, offering theatre members the best of her productions.

She started performing at a young age when she used to make fun of her relatives and put on hilarious comedy numbers for her primary schools classmates. Everyone laughed like crazy, as they still do today whenever she takes the stage.

More than Florentine by birth, she is Fiesolean but nomadic by spirit. She has entertained audiences in Los Angeles, New York, Prague, Amsterdam, Bucharest, Tokyo and Paris, which is a bit like her second home.

French are some of her masters and sources of inspiration: actor Jacques Lecoq, clown Pierre Byland and Jacques Tati. The French public is also one of the most captivated and enchanted by Maria: in 2009, the show 'Crepapelle' at the Théâtre du Rond Point in Paris became a case study, Le Monde dedicated two special features to it and Le Figaro included it among the top two hits of the theatre season in Paris.

"Crepapelle", written and performed by Maria, comes to the Carrie Hamilton Theatre - Pasadena Playhouse in Los Angeles, after Peter Schneider, a Disney producer, sees it for the first time at the Teatro del Sale. The meeting between him and Maria then gave rise to a new creation, a sort of anthology of all the characters, masks and clowns played by the actress up to that time. "My life with men and other animals", directed by Schneider himself and of which Maria Cassi is the performer and co-author, together with Patrick Pacheco, is staged in March 2012 in New York and definitively sanctions the international success of the Florentine artist.