Fiddling while Rome burns
Giant floats, masked balls, fabulous food and drink. Welcome to the Viareggio Carnival, the world's most enjoyable social protest
The carnival float is huge: 15 metres high by 20 metres long. On it is an executioner’s scaffold with a huge papier-mâché head of Beppe Grillo, a stand-up comic who has made it his business to mock and deride the political establishment of Italy.
Towering above Grillo is a masked executioner wielding a bloody axe. To his left and right stand similarly grotesque caricatures of the church leaders, politicians, Mafiosi and judges who have turned Italy into a byword for institutional corruption. Surrounding the floats – there are eight this size and dozens of smaller ones – are tens of thousands of Italians, most in carnival costume, dancing to a cacophonous amalgam of handbag house music and American punk rock.
This is the Viareggio Carnival, a festival that has turned decades of despair and righteous anger into a three-week party and exercise in bawdy, bracing satire. Imagine Spitting Image on steroids, or three-dimensional Gerald Scarfe cartoons.
Get this party started
Rooted in Catholicism and the anti-clericalism that religiosity inspired, the yearly carnival is essentially a pre-Lent food and booze binge. Abstaining from the good life in the month-long run-up to Easter may not be much observed in Italy these days, but the carnival carries on unabated. “Italians have spent generations sacrificing things for the sake of the church and unscrupulous MPs,” said one reveller. “Why pay homage to a fictional crucified deity, when for a few days you can poke fun at the catastrophe that is now Italy?”
The best known of the many masked balls that evolved out of Italian anti-clericalism is the Venice Carnival. Most pre-Lent Italian carnivals follow that lead but Viareggio, a 16th-century coastal town of 63,000 people in northern Tuscany – took a very different route. The first Viareggio Carnival was in 1873, two years after Italian Unification, and was initially a celebration of local food, poetry and art.
But Tuscany has a long history of seditious intent. Mistrustful of government, people here were, and are, equally appalled by the corruption of the Church. Following the Second World War the area became a rallying point for Marxists, anarchists and general malcontents. Viareggio’s carnival is simply the celebratory zenith of a well-founded culture of insurrection.
Good food, savage satire
Despite this, Viareggio knows how to have a good time. Children play happily around tables and old couples hold hands as they walk along the seafront. During each evening of the carnival, local women cook for the tens of thousands of visitors. On the final night, vast banquets of Tuscan specialities are enjoyed in the squares. But alongside the taste of fine wine and smell of great food, the talk is of political corruption.
It is this keen sense of the ways in which the Italian people have been wronged that imbues Viareggio with its bracing cynicism. But to assume that there is anything self-consciously worthy about the carnival would be wrong. The sculptors and artists who spend upwards of six months a year designing and building their floats are not earnest politicos but brash and bawdy satirists. As faith in the system has dwindled, the carnival has become increasingly savage.
Another fine mess
To reflect the current landfill crisis in Naples, a large group have dressed themselves as huge rubbish bins, with the papier-mâché heads of politicians and Mafiosi – price tags hanging from their ears and noses – poking out from beneath mounds of gold and refuse. Marta, a woman in her mid-forties, is dressed as an executioner of the Inquisition. Why, if things are so awful, does she – and everyone else here – looks so happy? She grins.
“History like we’ve had may be bad for Italy, but if you’re a satirist, if you are one of the artists who makes these floats,” she says, pointing towards a huge pig that’s eating itself, “then all this chaos makes for the most grotesque and funny ideas. And great floats make for a great carnival. In a perfect world there would be no need for tears or laughter. It is imperfection that makes us feel alive. That’s what makes us laugh.”
“We Italians do well. We’re a mess, but we do well,” claims Simone, a 23-year-old architecture student wearing a Small Faces T-shirt. “In the UK the state does well and the people do badly. In Italy the people do well but the state does badly. You choose.”
And with that he bounces off into the arms of a group of girls dressed as dominatrix nuns. Like Simone, many people manage to combine political nous with humour and indifference.
The Italians have just re-elected Silvio Berlusconi, a man many consider to be not a solution to corruption, but a corrupter-in-chief. I rang a friend on the day Berlusconi’s third term began. “We Italians are suckers for punishment,” he said with a distinctly mirthless laugh. “On the plus side, next year’s Carnival should be bloody funny.”
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Story by Ben Marshall