Sunday is the typical day to do the big Carnevale festival in these towns. There is also Fat Thursday and Fat Tuesday-- it is actually a whole week of Carnevale / Mardi Gras but we just did Sunday. Daniele got home from work about when these things typically start, so we went to the one in our town instead of driving somewhere else and risk missing it altogether. Monterotondo is a reasonably big town of 40,000 residents, but somehow the smaller towns but on bigger festivals.
It was basically a big parade of people in costumes. I guess for Latin cultures Carnevale is more their costume holiday than Halloween. Groups organize themes. There was everything from “Beauty and the Beast” to Traditional Farmers to a group of old ladies in black-face that I really couldn't figure out what they were going for. I explained to Daniele how it was really politically incorrect to wear black-face in the US anymore and he didn't get it at all. There were also performing groups like a marching band with baton girls and a group of Venetian-style masked dancers.
Everyone had bags of paper confetti or “coriandoli”. Confetti is actually the Italian word for the almond candies typically given at weddings.
The parade finished in one of the town squares, where everyone stayed together in a bit of chaos; playing music, dancing, kids re-gathering the confetti to throw again.
After we had seen most of what there was to see of Carnevale, we went in to the historical center of Monterotundo. It is a bigger than the other old towns we have visited.
[Edit] Pictures from this day are in the Monterotondo / Rome album:
https://picasaweb.google.com/kaitlyn.hanrahan/20110225RomaAndMonterotondo#
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