Carnevale di Viareggio Float Parade, Tuscany, 1960s

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Carnevale di Viareggio Float Parade, Tuscany, 1960s — Archive & Atlas

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Carnevale di Viareggio Float Parade, Tuscany, 1960s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1960–1969

AA-2026-7C4BDF

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Every February, the citizens of Viareggio committed themselves to building enormous papier-mâché caricatures of public figures and then parading them slowly through town while wearing overcoats, which tells you everything about Italian winter and Italian priorities. The crowd here is dressed for a cold day but has shown up anyway, children in matching orange coats positioned at the front as though civic festivity were something that required the proper uniform.

Above the heads of the crowd, a grotesque rider on a rearing horse towers over the piazza — the kind of figure the Viareggio workshops spent months constructing in order to make one pointed joke about a politician or a celebrity that would be understood, laughed at, and then burned at the end of the season. The floats were always destroyed. The Italians considered this the correct ending.

Viareggio's Carnevale had been running since the 1870s and by the 1960s had become one of the most technically ambitious carnival traditions in Europe, a fact the participants treated with complete seriousness while simultaneously dressing a ten-foot dummy as a fool on a horse. The crowd watches with the mild attention of people who have seen this before and will come back next year.

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