Also known as Martedì Grasso or Mardi Gras, this is the last day of the Carnevale celebration. Alas, we don’t have one in Los Angeles, but I was lucky enough to experience my very first season in Venice last year. These are some of the best snapshots, which (save the first and third) were taken by my talented friend Fernanda Galdames.
(See more photos at her website.)
People in elaborate costumes and masks flood the city, but the hub of all the pomp and circumstance is Piazza San Marco. They come from all over the world to see and be seen.
This troop of old ladies got some serious mileage. They seemed to pop up at any given moment in any part of Venice.
Let’s zoom in on the top left corner to examine…
…this dude in a grounded hot air balloon. I never saw how he did it, but he got all around the piazza in that thing. And he never broke character, even crouching down out of view in his basket to take calls on his cellphone.
All the exquisite colors transformed a relatively quiet, wintering city into a bustling, shiny place for those ten days.
Zoom in on the lady in blue…
…and be amazed by the attention to detail in these getups.
Simply breathtaking.
The city also put on its fair share of events, including my favorite: bejeweled dinosaurs that roamed through the crowds at P. San Marco.
Acrobats on stilts controlled these extraordinary raptors, even daringly snapping beaks at tourists’ cameras. Hah!
There was much too much booze during the nighttime celebrations for proper picture-taking. But there were chaotically beautiful moments that I faintly remember. Suffice it to say that one night I fell asleep on a vaporetto looking like this…
Maybe once was enough. Ciao, Carnevale!
Fluffy Culture Junkie 