Wild Parties for When the Four Horsemen Gallop

Book Club Feature published in Porch Magazine, January / February, 2005

[One of a series of articles on books written for this magazine.]

In that aromatic Mediterranean past before the invention of ice-boxes, there was a brief time when meats had to be consumed before they, like the spring, turned green. So “Carnevale” — literally “flesh farewell” in Italian (carne “flesh” and valle “farewell”) — rose from the canals of Venice after the feastday of Epiphany on January 6^th as nothing fancier than the chance to clean out the pantry. When plague hit, however, farewells to flesh acquired new urgency and meant so much more than rancid food, especially as communities stagnated under class structures and the punitive creeds of the Counter-Reformation. Citizens of Venice hid their identities behind elaborate masks and costumes so that they could blow off steam; it was a punishable crime to forcibly doff another’s mask.