Massafra Carnival

Massafra - Massafra is a town in the province of Taranto, here there is a great and ancient tradition, that of the carnival. The Massafresi are very attached to this festival which was celebrated even in more distant times, between 600 and 700 this festival took place in private in the palaces of noble families and in the houses of peasants, who considered this festival so important that they used the saying: You can spend Christmas and Easter anywhere, but for the carnival you have to go back to Massafra, this is because the peasants of the town worked far from home and all returned to the village to celebrate the carnival.

In 1953 there was the first official event, the participating floats are divided into two groups: - the real floats which are gigantic papier-mâché works that even reach 18 meters and are made by real masters and artists of papier-mâché , now enriched with special luminous effects as the show takes place in the evening; -the groups, which take their name from the ancients who went around the town in masks on the occasion of 'Fat Thursday'. Today groups are people (friends and relatives) who come together and dress following the same theme. The typical masks of Massafra are U'Pagghiusu in Italian the straw man, connected to what the neighboring countries of Massafra think, that is people who like straw are easily lit. And Gibergallo, a mask created in 2000 to pay homage to Giberto Gallo, one of the pillars of the carnival, who used to dress up in the same way every year and go around the town with a rooster on a leash.