Grand Tour

Festivals have always been used by civil and ecclesiastical authorities to curry favor with their subjects, and they play a considerable part in the accounts of travelers. The urban celebrations most frequently mentioned are, in the religious field, the feast of St. John the Baptist and the processions, and in the secular one, the masquerades of carnival and the traditional Palio or other races, whether of horses or carriages.

During the festivities in honor of St. John the Baptist in 1581, Montaigne was much impressed by the spectacle of the parades, processions and coach race, judging them “better” than any other he had seen in Italy. For his part Smollett (1765) was struck by the procession in honor of the Virgin Mary, made up of girls dressed in wide violet gowns and “an irregular mob of penitents in sack-cloth, with lighted tapers, and monks carrying crucifixes, bawling and bellowing the litanies”. This somewhat bizarre scene concluded with the image of the Madonna, covered with “a great quantity of false jewels, her face painted and patched, and her hair frizzled and curled in the very extremity of the fashion”. Describing the feast of St. Lawrence as “one of the national festivals of the Florentines”, Valéry (1828) claimed that the celebrations had declined greatly in comparison with previous centuries and mentioned the races of the “Barberi horses”.

Gibbon (1764) lingered instead over the description of the carriage races, although he thought them of ?“little nobility and even less competitive”? owing to the fact that the horses all belonged to the postal service. But he did admire the sight of the crowd that gathered to watch the race, lining up on the balconies, at the windows, even on the roofs. The race, between ?“four open four-wheeled carts with the rear part rounded in the form of a shell,”? consisted of three laps of the square, but the space was too small for the coachmen to be able to make up any advantage they had lost. Spence spoke of the carnival, a period when rules were suspended and the nobles in their carriages and the people on foot gathered in a large square, forming a varied and amusing spectacle in which Turks and Christians and emperors and chimneysweeps shared the same carriage or walked side by side.

Lalande (1765) distinguished himself from other travelers by dwelling at length on the game of calcio, or football, describing the pomp of its ceremonies, reserved for occasions of particular importance. The game consisted of a contest between fifty-four young gentlemen, divided into sides identified by colors and flags, who vied for the ball, trying to “send it beyond the barriers of their opponents and if they succeed, the match is won.” At that point, Lalande recounted, a struggle commenced for possession of the opponents’ ground, egged on by the cries and incitements of the spectators, and the ladies in particular. Caylus (1715) also mentions a festival that was normally ignored, that of the evening of August 2 on which Florence lit up its cathedral and many of its towers and let off fireworks to commemorate the capture of Siena. De Brosses (1740) presents another scene that was rarely described, that of the theater where animal fights were staged, and of the menagerie, where he saw “a lioness fetching things like a poodle, a tiger of enormous size and as beautiful as an angel, with two cubs of the worst character that can be imagined.” The presence of the menageries, in which exotic beasts from various countries were ill housed, to be painted by artists and studied by scientists, was a characteristic feature of the city, which also had to put up with the stink they produced, according to several travelers.

A separate section was the one devoted to the festivals of the countryside, with particular emphasis on the description of May Day. Castellan (1804), protagonist of a rural sketch, found himself dragged into the dance around the tree decorated for the festival and listening to legends about Charlemagne and the gifts that he bestowed on Calendimaggio (May Day), as well as the ones dispensed by his brothers and sisters Ferragosto (the feast of the Assumption), the Befana (Epiphany) and Mezza Quaresima (Mid-Lent). Among the others who described the festivities was de Brosses: “Five or six girls aged fourteen or fifteen, very finely dressed and the prettiest in the village, come together and go singing from house to house to wish everyone a merry May. And their songs are composed of a great chorus of voices of which the greater part are the most pleasant in the world. They express the hope that you will delight in the pleasures of youth as well as those of the season. That you will always have the same love in the evening and the morning. That you will live to the age of a hundred and two. That everything you eat will be turned into sugar and oil. That you will have no need of habits or lace, that Nature will always be bountiful and that the excellence of her fruit will surpass the beauty of her flowers.”