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Published: March 7th 2006
Carnevale 2006 A month before Carnivale arrived to Venice, I was warned by family and the natives alike to avoid the streets and be on the lookout for hords of costumed Venetians and international travelers. I think it may have all been in hopeful expectancy, because as the first days of festivities came and went, news of Carnevale and its famed magnitude were less and less favorable.
Historically Carnevale parades and processions were symbolic and plentiful, attracting thousands, including all the Venetians the themselves, to piazzas and campi to watch, jeer, cheer, hurray, drink, dance, chant, make merry and all other naughty things that were normally forbidden. Masks to hide ones identity, costumes to allow the slaves to wear their masters identity for a few days, Carnevale had a meaning and a history, a signifance known by its reveling community.
But what I experienced was a not even a morsel of what Carnevale was. The grandest spectacles were not as grand as they once were, due mostly to the fact that they have become spectacles and not events. To describe what I mean I refer to the costumed Venetians as they paraded the streets and stalked silently through
the crowds of San Marco, in their mysterious and hauntingly emotionless masks and hugely exaggereated, brilliantly beaded dresses. These couples became the singular spectacles, being followed by huge groups of tourists flashing cameras and hurrying to pose next to the gorgeously masked figures. The Venetian costume became the spectacle in a swarm of people that all should have been masked, or costumed, to one degree or another to participate in the event, as historically important, and not remain an outsider, a viewer, a photographer.
The event for which the crowds grew, attracted from hundreds if not thousands of miles, was more like a zoo, with the beautiful and savage behind fences, untouchable, when in fact, Carnevale should have been more participatory.
All these observations said, I myself, participating in Carnevale for the first and perhaps only time, had little choice but to (happily) don a mask myself (after 20 minutes of finding the right one at one of the many cheap, but “made in Venice” mask and souvenir stands), and gawk in awe at the dramatically colorful costumes that glowed even more brilliant under an overcast sky and a graying Venice. A walk through the many calle near my
school (San Marcuola is a very popular area, with a long and wide street that leads from the train station to the Rialto bridge) and near San Marco, and they were bands, singers, traditional costumes with long capes, feathered and long-nosed masks as well as those in more Halloween-like getups…super heroes, animals, ecc, puppeteers, 18th century soccer matches in the piazza, small theater productions, magicians and hundreds of face painters. Streets filled with colored confetti. The streets packed to their very edges. Fritelle (a sweet dough often with raisens fried and sprinkled with sugar) and gallani (a crispy dough in strips then dusted with powdered sugar) in packages secured with ribbon and stacked high. At night young and old didn’t hesitate to take advantage of the bars open late and the live music advertised in popular places, and bottles of wine, beer and spumante littered the streets at 3am. On the last night I heard about the huge theater events in San Marco and lay in my bed as the fireworks made the glass in the windows tremble at midnight.
700,000 visitors to Carnevale, but this year, like they say every year previous, has been the worse yet. How
can we keep tradition and not succumb to watering down, the numbed, erased, foggy meaning of what once was? Does Venice attract so many tourists it has no choice but to feed those open mouths with trinkets and false sense of what once was? Cycles such as this are a continual spiral towards more and more deafening commercialism. (I use deafening to describe the power behind money and it s ability to obscure objectivity.)
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Dr. Faust
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Carnevale ogni scherzo vale
How amazing that so many can afford to r ent these eighteenth century attires. But how enjoyable it must be to walk around in incognito and silence. Rare pictures.