Harlequin cheeks, and sometimes bushy brows with facial hair. Arlecchino is often depicted as having a wooden sword hanging from a leather belt on his person. Aside from his acrobatics, Arlecchino is also known for having several specific traits such as: and several other techniques. One of the major distinctions of "commedia dell'arte" is the use of regional dialects. Arlecchino's speech evolved with the character. Originally speaking in a Bergamo dialect, the character adopted a mixture of French and Italian dialects when the character became more of fixture in France so as to help the performers to connect to the common
Pierrot of Pierrot" (1900)—culminating, after the turn of the century (and in the year of Couto's death), with "Pierrot-Gravedigger" (1901). For the Spanish-speaking world, according to scholar Emilio Peral Vega, Couto "expresses that first manifestation of Pierrot as an alter ego in a game of symbolic otherness ..." Inspired by the French Symbolists, especially Verlaine, Rubén Darío, the Nicaraguan poet widely acknowledged as the founder of Spanish-American literary Modernism ("modernismo"), placed Pierrot ("sad poet and dreamer") in opposition to Columbine ("fatal woman", the arch-materialistic "lover of rich silk garments, golden jewelry, pearls and diamonds") in his 1898 prose-poem "The Eternal Adventure