A.A.V.V., la festa dei semplici – Carnevale di Alessandria del Carretto, 2023

“In the winter months, when darkness fell, the village was shrouded in an eerie silence. Snow covered doors and windows, the villagers wished for the gloomy winter to end, for the ‘earth fever’ to come and at the first warm rays of sunlight everything would begin to quiver and come alive again.”

Photographs, illustrations, stories and sounds that evoke a collective ritual of a small Calabrian village, Alessandria del Cerretto immortalised in 1959 by Vittorio De Seta in the documentary “I dimenticati”. De Seta began: “There are still villages in Calabria without roads such as Alessandria del Carretto in the province of Cosenza. To reach it you have to walk fifteen kilometres.”

The simplest description of a distance, a remoteness that today, as then, the harsh winter imposes on a small town on the slopes of the Pollino. Carnival in these parts is not a scapegoat, a puppet to be burnt or a fat man full of vices to be tried: it is a struggle.
Every Sunday between Candlemas and Shrove Tuesday, the town is enlivened by the staging of a clash between ‘handsome’ Punchinello and ‘ugly’ Punchinello: a veritable ritual battle between spring and winter, between day and night, between good and evil, perhaps what remains of the ancient battles fought by shepherds and peasants against witches and demons.
The staging of the ‘beautiful’ and ‘ugly’ was thus a seasonal rite of passage aimed at ensuring the rebirth of vegetation after the long, torrid winter; an auspicious ceremonial to welcome the new cycle of the year, an expedient to symbolically overcome the suffering and difficulties that the cold months imposed on the community.

And ‘The Feast of the Simple’ also returns as yet another ritual, arriving with a third carnival, for this year the series combines the photographic research of Francesco Buccarelli with the beautiful illustrations of Sarah Mazzetti, one of which is silkscreened in a limited edition, available in only 25 copies.

A project by ZicZic edizioni and Atelier Bizzarro

Photographs by Francesco Buccarelli
Illustrations by Sarah Mazzetti
Texts by Silvia Tarantini
Graphic design by Lilia Angela Cavallo and Silvia Tarantini, ZicZic