Italy’s festivals are civic theatre with centuries of rules behind them — a bareback horse race between the wards of Siena, a thirty-metre tower carried on the shoulders of a hundred men in Viterbo, and a city in masks in Venice.
Photo: Janus Kinase, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Many of Italy’s great festivals belong to a single city and are organised by its oldest communities: Siena’s seventeen contrade, Viterbo’s porters of Saint Rose, the people of Venice. They combine religious feasts with civic pride, and several have been interrupted, banned and revived over the centuries.
The Macchina di Santa Rosa is one of four Italian processions of giant shoulder-borne structures — with Nola, Palmi and Sassari — inscribed together on UNESCO’s Representative List.
Carnevale di Venezia
For two and a half weeks before Lent, Venice returns to the masks and costumes that made its carnival famous across Europe — banned for almost two centuries, revived in 1979, and now drawing millions of visitors to the city’s squares and canals.
January 23 – February 9, 2027Officially announced
Twice every summer, ten of Siena’s seventeen city wards race horses bareback three times around the Piazza del Campo. The race lasts about ninety seconds; the rivalries, alliances, pageantry and devotion around it last all year.
July 2, 2027Calculated
On the evening of 3 September, a hundred porters lift a tower some thirty metres tall and five tonnes in weight onto their shoulders and carry it through the medieval streets of Viterbo in honour of the city’s patron saint.
September 3, 2027Calculated