Line 1 — Carnival

Welcome to Line 1 of the Persicetana Cultural Metro, the line dedicated to the Historic Carnival of San Giovanni in Persiceto. Follow the orange route to discover the venues and the imaginative creations of our master carnival-makers. A journey full of snapshots of our Carnival – still images that characterise the town of Persiceto through the imaginative work of its inhabitants.

Piazza del Popolo is the venue for the San Giovanni in Persiceto Carnival. Every year, the carnival floats, as well as groups and individuals in fancy dress, parade through the square. Each float is created by local artists and craftspeople and, over the two Sundays of the festival, is accompanied through the streets of Persiceto by hundreds of people who bring out its unique character.

On the first Sunday, once they reach the square, the floats perform the “Spillo”, a spectacle in which they are almost completely transformed, thus revealing their allegory. Through ingenious mechanisms, new shapes, unprecedented colours, masks and characters appear, performing a brief but striking pantomime. The square becomes an open-air theatre and the parade turns into a performance. From the “closed box” of the float, just like from a great magician’s top hat, anything can emerge: angels and devils, self-propelled ships and astonishing animals, beautiful flowers and gigantic fruits, large depictions of famous figures, explosions and smoke of every colour.

The historic Persiceto Carnival officially began in 1874, but traces of it can be found in the writings of local historians dating back centuries earlier. The iconic figure of the Persiceto Carnival is Bertoldo, accompanied by his son Bertoldino and his wife Marcolfa: three fictional characters born of the imagination of the 16th-century writer Giulio Cesare Croce (1550–1609), who lived in San Giovanni in Persiceto.

In the work *The Subtle Wiles of Bertoldo*, written by Croce in 1606, the peasant Bertoldo embodies the very essence of wit, irreverent mockery and direct language, grounded in concrete realities. Bertoldo has entered the collective imagination as the peasant with “big shoes and a sharp mind” and has always been the inspiration behind the Persiceto Carnival.