Sunday, February 15, 2009

Carnival in Viareggio

While the best-known carnival activities in Italy are surely the ones in Venice, those have also become quite touristy apparently, and very expensive. Somewhat less known outside of Italy is the carnival of Viareggio, on the Tuscan coast, where we had been in the summer to go to the beach. During the Sundays in February, there's a big celebration here, and a parade with floats, costumes, loud music, and whatever else you expect from a carnival. We went there today with some of Kristen's classmates. After walking to the seaside promenade where all the activities are held, we looked at some of the floats that were already set up (the parade basically does one big loop on the promenade), before stopping for some lunch. I got "fish & chips," which in Italy apparently means "fried frutti di mare with french fries" ("extra tentacles").
Berlusconi cooking the opposition
By now it was almost time for the parade to get started, so we waited around some while getting blasted by extremely loud Italian party/carnival music. In the parade, a lot of the floats were quite elaborate, with moving parts, smoke machines, etc. Many of them had political themes and made fun of Italian politicians or the political situation in Italy, so except for picking out Berlusconi, I wasn't able to get the humor of a lot of them. Nevertheless, the parade was fun, and we had a good time.

1 comment:

Kristen said...

Carnival is Europe's Halloween.