AT NIGHTFALL THE DOOMED HORSE stands on a platform in Campo San Maurizio, one hoof raised as though frozen in full stride. Church bells ring out, and the noble members of the Company of the Stocking begin their procession around the square to the measured strains of Renaissance music, the men wearing velvet and tights, the women in long gowns with low, lace-trimmed bodices and wide skirts.
The crowd stands staring at the intended victim as the drum rolls start and the executioner climbs to his place, raises a brass fist at the top of a tall stave-and strikes.
The 990-pound horse, the joint creation of a sculptor and a confectioner, shatters into shards of bittersweet chocolate, that rain down on delirious children shouting and sqealing and scrambling below.
It is Carnival in Venice, and reality has become an abstraction.
Earlier in full daylight in St. Mark`s Square, a band of Slovenians draped in sheepskin and girdled with cowbells, their faces hidden behind parrot-beak masks, dip and bob and plunge in what is surely an ancient fertility dance. Nearby a giant birdman rhythmically raises and lowers wings covered with golden petals.
Two elderly Frenchwomen, wearing 17th Century court gowns and disdainful expressions on their faces, climb a humpbacked bridge. A tall pharaoh in a gold-and-black-striped robe, his face painted gold, carries a miniature of himself as a 3-year-old on his shoulders.
On the wharf near the Rialto Bridge, between the vegetable market and the fish market, a huge butterfly dances to the music of a flute as two gondolas glide silently past.
Dense crowds surge over the bridges and down the narrow streets to debouch into wide squares, where figures from the commedia dell`arte mingle with moors, witches, double-faced doges and dandies in tricorner hats. Rigid white masks of papier mache cover their faces.
They are not there so much to see the show as to be the show.
There is no curtain time. It goes on all day and most of the night as the cast of characters constantly invents and reinvents Carnival for itself. A costume helps; a mask is essential.
The year is 1990, but it might have been 1786, when Goethe attended the Venice Carnival and wrote: ”The base on which the entire spectacle rests is the public. The spectators are at the same time actors, and the crowd blends completely with the spectacle.”
Carnival is also a time when age, gender and social status can hide behind a mask, when being a narcissist and a voyeur is part of the game. Venetians call it a chance to live inside someone else`s skin.
Strolling, with pauses for snapping photos, is the main occupation today. And, aside from the cameras, not much has changed. A cardinal in full ecclesiastical regalia will pose on a bridge, then whip out his camera to take a photograph of an enfanta in ballooning skirts. In the everyday world, the cardinal would be a layman and the enfanta a woman, but the rules of the everyday world are suspended for Carnival. He might be she, and she, he. The only giveaway is their shoes.
Carnivalgoers take over all of Venice and spill back across the lagoon to the mainland city of Mestre for mass events such as pop concerts. There are private parties and public puppet shows, balls that cost hundreds of dollars per couple to attend and street dances that charge nothing. The traditional mimes, jugglers, tightrope walkers and fire-eaters perform in the squares alongside 1990s phenomena-a band of knee-high puppets playing rock `n` roll, a batmobile parked alongside a canal.
Restaurants offer Venetian specialties such as pasta e fagioli, a thick soup of short tubular pasta and white beans, or cuttlefish (called sepie)
cooked in their own ink and served in a risotto or with polenta, the Italian version of cornmeal. There are special dolce for Carnival, crisply fried little cakes called galani and deep-fried fritters called frittole, which also means ”carnival” in the Venetian dialect. They are simple treats adored by children, but they grow out of ancient, hardly childlike traditions.
As twilight deepens, the good-natured crowds grow thicker, and the squeeze over the bridges becomes tighter. Police appear and organize one-way foot traffic.
It is time to rest for a while at a bar, taking a table outside if the weather is mild, and to plan dinner and the evening`s amusements over a glass of sparkling white prosecco wine.
Rooted in fertility rites, the feast of the underworld in ancient Egypt, the Grecian bacchanals and the Roman saturnalias, Carnival evolved as an orgy of pagan hedonism that prepares the religious for the abstinence of Lent and the rebirth that comes with Easter. Only something that meets a deep human need could persist through so much of history and spread through so much of the world.
With the fall of the Venetian republic, the Serenissima, the Venice Carnival lapsed for two centuries but sprang up again in 1979. Now it seems it had never stopped.
The earliest record of the Venice Carnival was in the year 1094. Over the centuries it attracted masked revelers from throughout Europe. Some looked back to the fertility rites by putting on the faces of wild men, devils and, if men, dressing up as women. Others wore the masks of figures from the stage of the commedia dell`arte-Harlequin, Brighella, Columbine, Pulcinella, the Zannis and Venice`s Pantaloon.
Carnival lasted not just for weeks but for months. There was dancing and singing in the streets. In the Renaissance years, all the palaces of Venice, the convents, even the doge`s palace, were open to everyone during Carnival. Behind their masks, servants played at being masters, while masters acted as servants.
Later the Venetian city-state promulgated the ”Rules of the Mask,”
which permitted disguises only from St. Stephen`s Day, Dec. 26, through Shrove Tuesday. The penalty for breaking the rules was two years in prison.
To signal that the moment for donning masks had arrived, a servant of the state would appear in St. Mark`s Square in full costume, setting off shrieks of delight from the thousands massed in the square.
During the last, decadent years of the republic in the 18th Century, all rules vanished. Carnival began in October; continued, with brief pauses for Advent and Christmas, until the start of Lent; and then resumed in the summer. As Carnival evolved, the cheapest and most common disguise consisted of a long black cloak, a white papier mache mask and a tricorner hat. Men dressed as women and were called gnaghe. Among the popular masks, still worn today, are the bauta, which covers the face from the forehead to the end of the nose; the grand Casanove, named for the famous lover and covering the entire face;
the owl; the lion; the sun; and the Harlequin-all of molded papier mache or carved wood.
The eeriest mask, the plague doctor, was once worn out of necessity. It has a foot-long, pelican-shaped nose that doctors filled with spices and balsam, which they thought would protect them from catching the plague from their patients.
With the arrival of the French armies in 1494, venereal disease spread, provoking the kind of fear that AIDS does today. A law forbade the courtesans of Venice to wear masks in public so that they would be recognized when they appeared at cafes, balls, the theater and in gambling houses.
Carnival also offered innocent amusements. Roaming the city`s campi, the Venetian name for squares or piazzas, the revelers watched contestants fight on the Bridge of Fists, which was marked off by marble footprints at each of its four corners, and they saw rival factions competing in building human pyramids in the Campo San Polo.
In booths set up along the Riva degli Schiavoni, tightrope walkers, fire- eaters and magicians performed, and rare animals were put on display.
There were bull chases, dances and fancy parades.
The most important event of Carnival took place on Fat Thursday, also known as Hunting Thursday.
In the presence of the doge, the nobles and foreign ambassadors, a bull and 12 pigs were slaughtered, each with a single stroke of the sword.
Then came fireworks, a sword dance, acrobatics and the ”flight of the angel,” in which a tightrope walker crossed from the belltower in St. Mark`s Square to the pink and white Doge`s Palace.
These festivities commemorated a famous military victory of the republic and symbolized war, battle, skill and peace.
Carnival gave way to Lent at midnight on Shrove Tuesday with the burning of Pantaloon in St. Mark`s Square.
From the late 18th Century until the late 20th Century it appeared that the flames that had consumed Pantaloon had also destroyed the Venetian Carnival for good. But, phoenixlike, Carnival rose from its ashes.
In January 1979, the mayor of Venice, Socialist Mario Rigo, and a group of friends formed the Scuola Grande San Marco. Modeled on the guilds that existed during the Serenissima, the group`s purpose was to revive the Carnival.
The mayor then persuaded Maurizio Scaparro, head of Venice`s Biennale Theater Festival, to move the festival from October to February to make it coincide with the Carnival season.
The idea of renewing Carnival took hold among young Venetians, who copied costumes from 18th Century engravings. By 1980 people began coming from other parts of Italy and neighboring countries. It was almost as though Carnival had never stopped.
Each year since then has seen more elaborate Carnivals until a Pink Floyd concert in the summer of 1989 that caused such a mess and led the city to ban dances and other mass events in St. Mark`s Square for the 1990 Carnival and instead to spread more modest entertainments throughout other parts of the city.
Not everyone is happy with today`s Carnival.
For Arrigo Cipriani, owner of Harry`s Bar, Carnival in 1980 had ”a beautiful feeling” because of its spontaneity, and, he says, it has been downhill ever since. Cipriani was so disgusted with what he considers the event`s increasing commercialization and artificiality that he closed his famous watering hole during the 1989 Carnival.
Harry`s Bar was open again for the 1990 Carnival, but on the last Saturday of the celebrations none of the patrons was wearing costumes except for a German couple who were treated with chilly politeness by the bartender. ”What happened in 1980 could only happen in Venice,” Cipriani says.
”Venice is a town made to man`s dimensions. The young people went to see the plays of the biennale, and then they poured into the campi and became actors themselves.
”There were 20,000 people dancing in St. Mark`s Square. I went myself. It was moving, and there was no violence,” he says. ”But the next year they built this huge thing in St. Mark`s Square with loudspeakers. They said,
`Carnival is yours.` But it wasn`t. It was over.”
Cipriani believes the Venice Carnival should have become primarily a theater festival. ”There is nothing to do now but not talk about it for seven years and see what happens,” he says.
Other influential Venetians have taken to Carnival with a vengeance-and given it a 20th Century slant.
Gianni De Michelis, Italy`s Socialist foreign minister and foremost discotheque devotee, gives a Carnival party every year. In 1989 his guests had to wear costumes out of the ”Great Gatsby” movie. But in 1990 he outdid himself when he and a friend threw a party on the last night of Carnival in the Maritime Station, where guests received faxes from their friends all night long.
The theme of the party was ”Venice Looks to the Future.”
CARNIVAL 1991
The calendar will not be decided until late in the year, but here is a rundown of what to expect based on the 1990 Carnival.
DATES: Jan. 26 or Feb. 2 to early in the morning of Ash Wednesday, Feb. 12.
SITES: All over Venice and in the mainland city of Mestre.
EVENTS: Strolling players, mimes, clowns, dancers, jugglers, tightrope walkers and fire-eaters perform throughout the day and into the night in St. Mark`s Square, the smaller piazzas of Venice and along the Grand Canal. Many performances are unscheduled.
There will be a full calendar of cultural events, including art exhibitions, opera (probably), orchestral music, recitals and pop concerts, performances of the plays of Carlo Goldoni and film showings.
In addition to private parties in Venetian palaces for which invitations are required, there will be balls open to the public on the first and last weekends of Carnival. For details, contact the travel agency Bucintoro Viaggi 3941-521-0632.
COSTUMES: Much of the fun of attending the Venice Carnival is taking part in it by wearing a costume and mask. Bring your own costume or rent or buy one in Venice, but definitely buy your mask there. Street stands around St. Mark`s Square sell masks for as little as $4.50. Stands in Campo Stefano offer a wide variety of costumes and masks at a range of prices.
LOGISTICS: Calendars and information on bookings will be available at hotels and pensions.
For advance information, contact the Venice Tourist Office, Azienda di Promozione Turistica, Castello 4421, 30122 Venezia, Italia. Telephone 3941-522-6110. Telefax 3941-523-0399.
A WORD OF ADVICE:
Make your hotel reservations immediately because hotels fill up early. If no room is available in Venice, try Mestre, Treviso or other cities with frequent train or bus service to Venice.
