This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/Euclideian_Jesuit on 2024-01-25 23:09:29.
Carnevale is fast approaching: next week, on Sunday, there will be this year’s first float parade. This years’ is particularly important, however, because it will also be the 150th time the Carnevale di Viareggio has been celebrated.
While I am far from what is called a “carnevalaro” (that is, somebody treating the Carnevale as the only worthy event in town), I still think it’s a pretty cool event that is scarcely known outside of Italy… and also one fraught with controversies.
And I am going to start with an event that could pique the interest of outsiders, and also is easy to document (normally I would tell the tale of “Yatches vs. Confetti Debate”, but very little documentation of it exists, so…).
So, without anymore delay, let us start!
What Even Is “Carnevale di Viareggio”?
In the event you don’t know, “Carnevale” is the general term referring to the five weeks preceding Lent, also known “Those 40 days where practicing Catholics abstain from meat and something they love before Easter”, and the basis for both the New Orleans and the Rio de Janeiro’s celebrations. It usually is capped off by Fat Tuesday, but officially it ends only on Ash Wednesday on the following week.
What makes Viareggio’s Carnevale celebration special is that, every Sunday of these weeks, and on Fat Thursday, Friday and Tuesday there’s a parade of very elaborate floats made of papier-mâché– often, but not always, themed after political satire, with the occasional attempt at high art– down the promenade, spanning for nearly 1,5km (0,94 miles, for the ones using Imperial units). Said parade started as a bunch of very decorated carriages strolling down the town’s seaside road in 1873, but over time it got increasingly complex, with the first instance of such a parade in a form recognizable as the one of the modern day happening in 1921, when the very first “Carnevale song”, Su Una Coppa di Champagna, was composed, accompanied by a choreography on (what turned out to be) the winning float. The only interruptions were in the 1942-1945 time period, when WW2 put a halt to the tradition (and, even then, the Buffalo Soldier 92nd Division’s soldiers were outright requested to start from Viareggio first in clearning the beach from mines for this exact reason), and in 2021, due to the Coronavirus Pandemic.
Nowadays, every Fat Thursday the parade is broadcast live on RAI (the national TV broadcaster), and each year it attracts between 500k and 600k visitors. These floats are made by teams of constructors (traditionally papier-mâché over a wood-metal structure, but in recent times styrofoam and the like has been allowed, too), called carristi, who work on them for three to six months each year, and are divided in three categories, from highest to lowest: carri di prima categoria, carri di seconda categoria, and mascherate singole, with people not registered as carristi usually doing simpler things, like joining a neighbourhood’s group on small dancing stages with some unobstrusive but colorful decorations, or just organasing themselves with small ungraded productions on their own. Each category, on top of that, vyies for a prize, assigned by a jury composed by the Fondazione Carnevale’s members (that is to say, the organisers) and selected “important” citizens of the town, for the most elaborate and interesting float of each category.
The method through which one climbs the categories are not unlike how sports teams climb scoreboards, but their exact functioning is not important for our tale: what matters here is, carri di prima categoria are both taken as THE symbol of Carnevale di Viareggio, winning the competition for them is a Big Deal, and winners are also the ones who get a cash prize if they get the jury’s favour. As you can imagine, this can have some interesting effects.
A Quick Premise
Before the drama’s tale starts, I’m going to need you to make a little mental exercise.
Picture this: you’re a carrista in the late Seventies-early Eighties. You’ve probably started working on floats since you were a strapping young man that narrowly escaped being drafted in WW2, taught by artisans who treated going to the nearby town of Camaiore “a whole-day journey”, that genuinely hated people from Lucca (instead of later semi-affectionate rivalry), and spoke exclusively in Viareggio’s dialect; or, if you started later, you’ve seen only other people from Viareggio work on floats, from the planning phase to the actual parade, passing through the construction itself, with the most exotic person in the team being a Florentine guy.
You’ve been in contests with other people just like you for decades, people who you might have shared a day job with or, if you were lucky enough to not need that, had a beer with and chatted to during the off times. If a new name pops up, it’s going to belong to somebody who, at the very least, hails from Versilia– that is to say, the sub-region you live in– and even working with women doesn’t bother you.
Then, one day, a half-French guy and his fully French lover (not even wife!) arrive in 1980. They start off doing mascherate singole, small things, isolated figures that basically compete for a pat in the back on the newspaper, nothing major. But he speaks in a French accent and doesn’t know the dialect well, and she can barely string together a sentence in Standard Italian, and due to this at first they mostly stay in their studio, assembling and creating while having little contact with you. Weird, but manageable, right?
Then the guy makes an instant jump to seconda categoria. At first, he doesn’t even qualify. Then, he almost wins 1982’s contest for that category with Il Trionfo della Legge Del Menga, a float that you consider a mess technically for breaking the rule of “scenery, main mask, garnishing”, by having a lot of single masks surrounding a big one, and, worst of all, contains in its title a word that’s Milanese in origin. But, surely, this is a fluke, right?
The next year, with I Quattro Mori, he outright wins again, this time with a float that’s utterly incomprehensible to you, but has a theme adored by the Fondazione. The next year, he wins again, and, the year after that, he gets on the podium. You get your hopes up for one year, but then, he finally wins the coveted prize, and in doing so breaks the winning streak of somebody you consider an untouchable idol, a man you strive to emulate or work under.
So, what do you do?
You flip your goddamn shit.
But what are the facts?
Gilbert LeBigre was born in Florence from a Florentine mother and a French father. However, for the longest time, he actually lived in Paris, working as a scenographer, going to Viareggio only in 1980, when, allegedly, his rediscovery of an old photo depicting his mom on Viareggio’s beach while she’s pregnant with him convinces Gilbert that, actually, he isn’t destined to spend his life in Paris. So, together Elodie Lebigre (neé Elodie Roger), and encouraged by Silvano Avanzini and Raffaella Giunta’s teachings in float-making, he moved to Viareggio and partecipated in that season’s Carnevale with Inquinamento o Vita (“Pollution or Life”), a bunch of themed masks that didn’t run in the contest due to the feeling it was a “prototype. The next year, he, together with a “hireling”, organised a masked group called Le Colonne dell’Avvenire, but it still was left out of the course due to a bureaucratic error. In 1982, the LeBigre-Roger couple creates the first participating float, Il Trionfo della Legge del Menga (“The Triumph of Cock’s Law”, note the term menga is not standard Italian nor Tuscan, but Lombard): for a relative newcomer, it’s a smashing success, arriving in second place, but the more traditionalist circles grumble about menga, some arguing it should’ve been enough to disqualify the float, though such concerns are ultimately ignored by the jury.
I Quattro Mori is the following year’s float, and it’s the first time LeBigre wins a prize… but it also caused uproar, because of its abstractness and disconnect from all other floats, which were more politically pertinent and had clear themes (also, the reference to the city of Livorno was not appreciated). While the critics’ complaints were hushed by him making Il Sogno di Fellini, the following year’s winner, the underlying attitude towards Lebigre never went away, not helped by his alleged reluctance to take part in the events of the carristi, at least, if Avanzini wasn’t involved as well.
Futuro Prossimo Venturo was the third victory in a row for Lebigre. People like Giovanni Lazzarini (the husband of the daughter of Burlamacco’s designer, that is, Umberto Bonetti, and an accomplished carrista and jury member at alternate times) and the Galli brother (Arnaldo, Renato and Giorgio, who were considered the epitome of Carnevale in Viareggio, and the most respected in their craft) were by now spreading vicious rumors about his commitment to the craft and his skills, and minor carristi were more than willing to listen to them, which in turn enabled a climate of shunning within…
Content cut off. Read original on https://old.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/19fl8zs/parade_floats_lebigre_aint_so_bigre_what_happens/