Carnival in the countryside: traditions and customs of yesterday and today

We all know Carnival and we all have a relatively clear idea of it. We associate with it memories of masks, sweets and parades.

Some more and some less, we also know when to place it. It is the February non-holiday, the time of the year that, if you are no longer a child, you don’t know what to do with it. It is not a recognized holiday after all, and therefore the world does not stand still in its presence. So that we, too, sometimes risk forgetting about it.

Carnival in the countryside yesterday: joy and subversion

Until recently, Carnival was mainly the middle period between two festivities of the Christian calendar, Christmas and Easter, while being everything that Christian is not.

When religious celebrations punctuated the lives of most, and defying them meant incurring spiritual guilt and sometimes social isolation, Carnival served as a compromise and allowed a parenthesis of concessions between two long sessions of penance.

Carnival, then, took on an even deeper significance in the countryside of northern Italy and the small villages that populated it. Its recurrence coincided with the approach of the end of the winter silence of the fields, where nothing could be done, and the beginning of the grueling, but hope-filled, harvest season.

Carnival in the countryside took on the features of a moment of necessary subversion, when, when nothing was yet decided, everything could be.

In the peasant world, every blessing was linked to a successful harvest and every misfortune to a lean season. Relying on the benevolence of Heaven therefore seemed more reasonable than ever, since Heaven with its gifts took charge of the fate of the farmers. Few would have defied lightly the penance demands approved by the Catholic Church.

And so, Carnival in the countryside took on the features of a moment of necessary subversion, when, when nothing was yet decided, everything could be.

The old year had passed, the new year was to come. During Christmas one had purified oneself, and the labors of Lent could wait. The feast of St. Anthony the Abbot, January 17, or Candlemas, February 2, sanctioned somewhat throughout northern Italy the beginning of a time when some small transgression seemed permissible.

The countryside then came alive. People moved from house to house, from village to village, ventured a sociality that work and decorum forbade, and devoted more time than was Christianly acceptable to collective drinking, community gatherings and gastronomic delights.

In anticipation of the Lenten fasting and abstinence, playful traditions and mouth-watering and nutritious recipes were crystallized over time; marriages were hastened and unions were fostered between families from sometimes neighboring, sometimes more distant, but still always unreachable in planting and harvest time.

When Carnival later became synonymous with parades and floats is not known exactly, but in the countryside this declension is slow to become a costume.

Funny disguises, grotesque masks and semi-fantastic characters, however, were almost never lacking, and their guises – of bears, wolves, goats, turkeys – always betray a reference to a reality that many of us struggle to understand today. The bear, an animal symbolic of hibernation, would attempt the first exit from its torpor at Candlemas. If the weather was too clement he would return to his den, spring would be late in coming.

Marking the end of Carnival was the looming period of Lent, the beginning of which was dictated by Ash Wednesday and changed in case of High or Low Easter.

Never fixed, never quite defined was thus always the carnival period, in perfect harmony with the elusive and rebellious soul of the festival itself. At its close, it is true, penitence overlooked, but also the sense of rebirth that March always brought.

Backs bending over the fields again, yes, but also the reverberation of a moment of joy and lightheartedness, and the certainty of longer, warmer days on the horizon. So here Carnival became the perfect expedient, entirely secular and very earthly, to break the inexorable and slow order of country life.

Carnival in the countryside today: rediscovering traditions

Today, without the Christian calendar to define our lives, we see Carnival changing shape and taking on different nuances. Once the festival of improvisation, of the overturning of precise and predetermined rules, Carnival for the past few decades has been looking to tradition, repeating itself, taking shape in yearly parades and village festivals.

In the countryside, ancient masks and disguises take on local character, coming to define with their features places and identities whole communities that are dispersing and trying to find themselves in a figure that sums them up. They are crafts, animals or even fanciful ideas that collect this or that village legend, or echo distant memories of historical episodes and battles fought in the territory.

This is the case of Carvé vej, the Old Carnival, a custom widespread in Piedmont that immediately brings to mind traditional clothes, typical recipes and masquerades. A recent custom, however, despite its name, an attempt not to let the meaning and sense of joy of the festival slip into mere memory.

The new stars of the modern carnival, then, are the children, once minor extras in the grand story of country work. Today it is the little ones who need to break the long boredom of winter; they are the ones who love the disguise that makes them dream of adult life for a while.

For adults, on the other hand, Carnival has lost the secular sense of shaking up a pre-established religious order, but it is irreplaceable chance to reconnect with that now vanished rhythm of life in the fields, as much loved as hated by our great-great-grandparents.

In this sense, in short, Carnival continues to become a subverter of the status quo, a temporary overturner of the interconnected and highly urbanized reality in which we are immersed.

Carnival in the countryside today: initiatives in the Langhe and Roero

The Langhe and Roero, whose lands have for a very long time been the scene of the endless succession of peasant rhythm, perfectly reflect the parable of Carnival.

Today, tradition blends with the quest for modernity, and ancient masks converse in harmony with small festive crowds of children and young people sporting the most diverse disguises.

Thus, the Magnin, the chimney sweeps, animate the streets of Bastia, Briaglia and Cigliè every year, reenacting a time when the end of their work coincided precisely with the carnival period and the first thaw.

And so Ciciaret, the village chatterbox, is the character who appears in the streets of Corneliano to search for his Turibia, the mask that serves as his counterpart in nearby Piobesi, a reminder perhaps of those Carnival customs, mentioned earlier, of uniting families from not-so-distant villages in marriage.

Also in the same vein are Cecilia and Roldano, the masks of Caraglio, a municipality that sees its streets populated every year in February for the festival. The legend of these characters, now so dear to the community, is ancient and calls to mind the more famous story of Paolo and Francesca, but it has a happy ending. Here, Dusu, the squire jealous of the love between the two young people, is symbolically burned at the stake as a reminder of a liberation, always longed for but almost never achieved, of the weak from despotic lords.

Mussotto, Alba, Guarene and many other villages are also dusting off traditions or looking to the future with carnival dinners, meetings and concerts. In short, everyone, in their own way, stays true to the spirit of the festival and subverts at least for one day the usual order.

Partial bibliography

• Tersilla Gatto Chanu, Leggende e Racconti Popolari del Piemonte, Newton Compton Publishers, Roma 2022.
• Giovanni Kezich, Carnevale. La Festa del Mondo , Editori La Terza, Bari-Roma 1019.