Rituality and Social (Dis)Order by Alessandro Testa

Author:Alessandro Testa [Testa, Alessandro]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Europe, General, Historiography, Social History
ISBN: 9781000223729
Google: qNUDEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2020-11-29T16:01:41+00:00

Just like Savonarola had observed 150 years before, collective madness returns as the distinctive mark of Carnival, in Rome as well as in any other place where the event occurs: the vivid insight by John Evelyn substantiates the state of radical reversal, when normality is abolished during the Carnival, and “when all the world are as mad at Rome, as at other places”. The popular character of the Roman folly is further underlined by those last words, in which the Roman populace is evoked as a composite “manner of rabble”.

Describing the carnival of Rome more than 100 years later, the authoritative voice of Goethe constitutes an invaluable source of information and details:

The long and narrow street in which innumerable people lurch hither and thither, it is impossible to survey; it is scarcely possible to distinguish anything within the limits of the tumult which your eye can grasp. The movement is uniform, the noise stupefying… All that is here given is a simple sign that each man is at liberty to go fooling to the top of his bent, and that all licence is permissible short of blows and stabs… The difference between high and low seems for the time being abolished, every one makes up to every one, every one treats with levity whatever he meets, and the mutual licence and wantonness is kept in balance only by the universal good humour… In this way is the expectation in every day fed and kept on the strain till at last a bell from the Capitol, shortly after noon, announces that people are now at liberty to fooling under the bright heaven. Immediately upon hearing it, the serious Roman … doffs his earnestness and gravity… The masks now begin to multiply. Young men dressed in the holiday attire of the women of the lowest class … are the first ones to be seen. They caress the men they meet, allow themselves all familiarities with the women they encounter… The women having just as much a mind to don the breeches as the men the petticoats, the fairer sex show no contempt for the favourite costume of Pulcinella; and in this hermaphrodite figure, it must be allowed, they often show themselves in the highest degree charming. With rapid steps, declaiming as before a court of justice, an advocate pushes through the crowd. He bawls up at the windows, lays hold of passers-by masked or unmasked, threatens everybody with a process, impeaches this man in a long narration of ridiculous crimes, and specifies to another the list of his debts. He rates the women for their coquetries, the girls for the number of their lovers. Even seriously disposed people, who sit themselves without masks in their carriages, permit their coachmen and servants to wear them. The coachman usually selects a female dress, and in the last days of the Carnival women alone appear to drive the horses… Everything is permitted in these days.11

Goethe wrote these lines during his second stay in Rome, in February 1788.

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