The sorrounding
Sea Walk during the Viareggio Carnival
The tradition of the parade of floats (first calessi) in Viareggio dates back to 1873, [2] when some rich bourgeois decided to dress up to protest against the too many taxes they were forced to pay. [Without a source] Tradition has it that the idea is born at the tables of the Casino del Casino, inaugurated forty years before. [2] Since then, every year this parade eliminates the discontent of so many people and, at the end of the century, triumphal stucco floats appeared, heavy materials, later replaced by molded papier-mâché, to find the maximum refinement in the 1930s 900 with the cast paper.
The First World War led to a six-year war break. The event resumed in 1921 and the carts paraded on two marvelous boulevards at sea.
On February 20, 1971 the first district carnival of the Darsena took place [3].
The third parade of the 2011 edition beat every Record, in fact more than 325,000 [4] people applauded the papier-mâché floats that paraded along the Viareggio sea promenade.
The papier mache
Papier-mâché is a preparation essentially composed of water, glue, plaster and paper; the manufacturing process starts with the creation of a clay model. With a cast of plaster on this model the negative of the cast is obtained, inside which the strips of paper that have been previously soaked in a mixture of water and glue are applied. Thanks to this material the tankers are able to shape very large masses and volumes and, thanks to the lightness of the empty shapes, the cart is a spectacular self-propelled structure. The strips are then adhered to the cast, which then needs several hours to dry.
Then the papier-mâché work is removed and, after having been sanded with sandpaper, the decoration is done with acrylic or tempera paints, which are covered with an additional glossy protective varnish. The first papier-mâché cart was made in Viareggio in 1925: "The Knights of the Carnival" by Antonio D'Arliano. Currently one of the great masters of the papier-mâché is Arnaldo Galli who, together with his brother Renato and Silvano Avanzini, has collaborated in the construction of stage materials in films by Federico Fellini such as Casanova and Boccaccio '70, building an enormous Anita Ekberg. Papier-mâché masks of the Viareggio masters have been the setting for the opening ceremony of the Italia 90 World Cup and the closing ceremony of the XX Olympic Winter Games.