La Fiera di Paese 鄉村集市 村のお祭り

La fiera di paese

The Village Fair, Venice Carnevale, 2026

There is something wonderfully nostalgic about the travelling fair — a place where ordinary life gives way, for a few fleeting hours, to colour, spectacle and make-believe.

“La fiera di paese” draws its inspiration from the old European village fairs of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: wandering entertainers, painted carousel horses, mechanical curiosities, sweets, games of chance and strange treasures carried from town to town. At Carnevale, that forgotten world seems entirely at home in Venice.

The two characters appear as if they have stepped out of an antique travelling carnival. Their elaborate costumes are playful rather than aristocratic — turquoise, powder pink and flashes of candy colour replacing the sombre grandeur of traditional Venetian dress. A carousel horse rises improbably above them, while wheels, toys, ribbons and confectionery-like ornaments turn their costumes into miniature fairgrounds of their own.

Yet beneath the humour lies a certain melancholy. Village fairs were temporary worlds. They arrived with noise and excitement, transformed a familiar square into somewhere magical, and then disappeared — leaving behind only an empty piazza and the memory of what had been there.

I wanted the portrait to feel like one of those memories: half photograph, half old painting, as though the figures had been discovered inside a faded theatrical canvas from another century. The distant fair, carousel and Venetian architecture dissolve into the background while the two performers remain vividly present, suspended somewhere between reality and fantasy.

At the Venice Carnevale, this boundary becomes especially fragile. Adults become characters, streets become stages, and history is freely reinvented for a few extraordinary days.

“La fiera di paese” is a celebration of that fleeting world — whimsical, eccentric and slightly surreal; a village fair that perhaps never existed, except in our imagination.

My Italian friends Lorenzo Marconi and Elena Malozemova are no strangers at the Venice Carnevale. Their costumes are always the best and I am always so happy to see them at the Venice Carnevale.