Carnevale at Via Reggio

Sunday we spent the day at the (fantastic) carnevale celebration at Via Reggio, a city on the coast about 1-1/2 - 3 hr away by train (depending on which train you took!).  It was a very long day for us, and we were exhausted when we got home, but it was worth it!  We took a bunch of pictures and even some video with sound, which hopefully will play on this site, since it gives you a much better feeling of the experience than stills do.

The parade was right down near the beach on a wide street that paralleled the coast.  They barricaded off a long section along it and charged admission (of course!)

Most kids and many adults were dressed in costumes.  Some, like in the photo below, were performers in the parade or on the floats.  We saw whole families dressed up.  There was the dragon family, The Super Mario Brothers, men dressed as women, women dressed as men, lots of rabbits, lots of Indians but very few cowboys, many in old Egyptian dress and a personal favorite, a couple dressed as fungi (mushrooms) in incredibly well done costumes. 

All were just dressed up to have a good time!  And so they did.  While the atmosphere was party-like and people weren't at all orderly, we saw no sign of drunkenness or belligerent behavior.

One of the pharohs....

Here's one of the floats.  We don't have a clue as to its meaning.

Italy is actually celebrating for the first time Unity Day on March 17.  (2011 is the 150th anniversary of the unification of Italy.)  That surprised us as the Italians don't seem any too excited about being unified.  The whole country is supposed to shut down that day and we will have a day off from school.  Above is the float commemorating Unity Day - it was one of the themes of the festival.

The very first float after Unity Day which also was the general welcoming float was the Obama float.  It was not too flattering, but none of the floats in this parade ever are.  They are expected to make fun of notable people.  So far from what we have gathered Obama is pretty well respected over here.  The guy up in Obama's top hat is supposed to be bin Laden!

As you can see, these floats were quite wide, taking up almost the whole street.  People danced and milled everywhere in the streets, so it was sometime a tight squeeze.  The "Float Police" would come along and push people back really crunching bodies together.  It's hard to imagine anyone doing crowd control with Italians - its rather like herding cats!  Sometimes I would be so close to the floats I could touch them.  As soon as the float passed, people would go back out into the street until the next one came. 

The music played for the "Jaws" float was "We will, We Will Rock You".  This one was supposed to have an ecological them.  Music was often in English although there were a lot of well-known songs in Italian.  The crowd often sang and danced along.

We were told that the man pictured as holding the controls on this "monster of technology" is Vespa.  Every part of almost every float moved and that movement was created by someone pulling on pulleyed ropes or just mechanically moving it.  They were not computer controlled.

Here justice moves slowly  like a snail and isn't always dealt out evenly (the scales).

 

This float (Africa) was amazing as in all of Italy they couldn't seem to find Afro-Italians to play Africans!  The women dancing on the front of the float wore brown leotards to make them look black.  The float actually had a theme of Africa being both a land of plenty and a land of famine.  In the front is a mother holding a starving child.   

 

One of the most unusual floats.  The Avatar (or spaceman) had piercing eyes that glowed and looked very life-like.  It was called "The Voyagers of Space....Where Is The End Of It All."

See Below

The two pictures above chose an easy target.....Berlisconi. - as a dinosur skeleton.  It showed his face that would divide and show a skeleton underneath. 

Again, the president of Italy, but not as Berlisconi , but "Burlesque-coni" written on his back.

Now in Italy sexuality is more out in the open.  But there was only one float that we thought might not be great to forward on to you because of it's sensuous nature and we don't know if any children are reading this.  In the front of the float was Ganeesh, the  Indian Elephant god.  On the back of the float were all sorts of mechanical figures doing the horizontal hokey-pokey.  Not sure of why or how, but it was definitely one to remember. 

All of the floats had a lot of people in costumes on them dancing and singing and much of the music was live singing.  In many of them there were dancers, too.  This particular parade will happen at least 4 times this season in Via Reggio and seems to be a town money maker.  The floats are all created by different regions of the town.  We have never seen the likes of it and probably won't again.

Meanwhile one of our classmates, an older man from Canada who flies around the world as an economist, stayed in town and managed to catch several people dressed up in Renaissance costumes.  They were celebrating the birthday of Michalangelo and went to his tomb in Santa Croce for a service of celebration. Wish we could have seen that, too.

This morning the street cleaners were still cleaning up the confetti-strewn streets around Florence.  Tons of it were dropped on ViaReggio and we even found some in our underwear.  It's still a mystery how it got there.

Ciao!