The Carnival in the Mòcheni Valley

Growing up, Carnival meant movement, noise, fun. Then, as a teenager, it became anticipation. I was waiting for the dance.

The music of the Reta went straight inside me. That was the time when boys and girls from nearby villages would arrive. In a village where for months you always saw the same faces, Carnival opened a window through which new possibilities entered, step by step, in dance.

I saw couples form at those dances, engagements announced amid the audience’s laughter and then turned into marriages the following year. That’s when I began to realize that the Carnival in the Mòcheni Valley was not a simple costume party, but an ancient and necessary social ritual.

When, during the Betcho performance, the reading of the will took place, the names of the couples were read aloud—first the young men and women of the same age group, then everyone else. In this way, between one joke and another, what was beginning to blossom—and had remained suspended throughout the year—was made public.

But the first time I truly understood what Carnival was, was when I followed the procession from beginning to end. Not only the afternoon in the square, where there were crowds and confusion, but also before that, from house to house.

The old man and the old woman would stop at each doorstep and perform a blessing-like sowing gesture, as if they were in a field. Families thus imagined rich harvests in their future, full vegetable gardens, and successful work. Within that playful performance there was something very serious: the collective desire for abundance and fertility.

Behind them came the godfather, the “Oiartroger,” with a crate on his shoulders. Inside were the eggs offered by the families, laid in sawdust so they wouldn’t break. Each house would leave a few, and those eggs would later symbolically become cakes, which would be broken and distributed to everyone, straight from the pans.
This is what fertility means in the Mòcheni Valley: that nothing be lacking, that no one be left alone, and that the year to come be stronger than the one that ends.

Then one year I was the Betcho. It happened a bit by chance, as important things often do: someone asked, someone else said my name, and I said yes before truly understanding what it meant.

Being the old man means responsibility—carrying the village on your shoulders and, above all, knowing that every word will be remembered, because every joke touches someone. When I read the will, I felt the weight of all this. While everyone laughed, I pretended to leave the worst possessions to the couples: the steepest slopes, crooked houses, noisy classrooms, inconvenient fields. But in those laughs there was recognition and awareness.

When I fell to the ground pretending to be dead, I was staging the transformation inherent in the Mòcheni Carnival: you symbolically die in order to stand up again, different. It is a New Year without a midnight countdown, without fireworks.

Today, when Carnival arrives in Palù, given my age I walk instead of run. But I recognize the gestures that once seemed so strange to me as a child: the black mark on the cheeks of unmarried girls and children, the sound of the godfather’s bell, the seeds on the thresholds, the dance on the stone, the cakes, and the names called out loud.

And when at the end the Betcho’s hump is burned together with the will, I always stay and watch the fire until only embers remain. Because it is in that moment that I strongly feel everything this rite represents.