The Venice Carnival Few Ever See

Private palazzi, masked galas and the city beyond the crowds, for the traveller who wants Carnival as it was — not as it is performed.

The Carnival of Venice is the most photographed event in Italy, and yet the photograph and the event are scarcely the same thing. The photograph is the daylight Carnival of Piazza San Marco — a festival of costumed amateurs, posing for cameras, performed for cameras, and over by sundown. The event itself, the Carnival the Venetians have kept alive in some form since the eleventh century, takes place behind closed doors, after dark, in palazzi most visitors will never enter. To attend it requires either a Venetian last name or a great deal of planning.

A Brief, Necessary History

The Venice Carnival was, for most of its long life, a season of social inversion: a span of weeks each winter when the rigid hierarchies of the Republic dissolved and a masked citizen could speak to a Doge as if the two were equals. The masks — the bauta, the moretta, the volto — were not costume but social apparatus, a kind of legal anonymity. The Republic legislated their use; the Council of Ten worried about them. By the eighteenth century the Carnival ran for nearly six months and had become the great pleasure-engine of European travel; visitors came from London, Paris, and Vienna to take part.

Napoleon ended it in 1797 along with the Republic itself. The Carnival lay essentially dormant for nearly two centuries. What we have today is a revival, dating from 1979, that has built a global daytime spectacle on top of a slowly recovered private tradition. Our work is in the second of these — the private Carnival — which is smaller, older, and considerably more interesting.

The Costume, Properly Made

A Carnival evening in Venice begins, for our clients, two months before they arrive — at the atelier of one of the three or four costume makers in the city whose work meets the standard of the great masked balls. Atelier Pietro Longhi, Atelier Nicolao, the late Stefano Nicolao's house of more than ten thousand pieces — these are the places where the costumes that the photographs do not show originate. Hand-cut velvet, true gold thread, period silhouette, period weight. A bauta in papier-mâché made on a wooden form by a maskmaker working from his grandfather's drawings.

The fitting itself is part of the journey. Clients come to Venice in late autumn or early winter for a long afternoon at the atelier; the costume is then made and stored until the night of the ball. On the evening, a porter delivers it to the suite. The cost is a fraction of what the great Parisian houses charge for far less considered work, and the result is something one can wear, in good conscience, beneath a Tiepolo ceiling.

The Three Balls That Matter

Of the dozens of masked events promoted during Carnival, three retain the standard of the original tradition. We will not name all of them in print. We can say that one is held annually in a palazzo on the Grand Canal that has remained in the same family for four centuries; that another is a smaller, more contemporary affair organised in a deconsecrated church on the Giudecca; and that the third, the rarest, is by personal invitation only and accommodates fewer than one hundred and twenty guests. The dress codes are exacting, the orchestras are real, and the suppers — most often served at three or four in the morning — are cooked by chefs flown in for the night.

Access to these is not transactional. It is built, over years, by relationships our office has cultivated with the host families and their representatives. Our most established clients have attended one or two for several years running. New clients we propose for them only after a previous successful collaboration. The private Carnival is a closed circle by nature; if it were not, it would not be the private Carnival.

The Days Around the Ball

The ball itself lasts a single night. The journey around it, in our planning, lasts six. We surround it with the slower Venice — the Venice that even seasoned visitors rarely arrange. A morning at Tintoretto's Scuola Grande di San Rocco, opened privately at nine, before any visitor. An afternoon at Palazzo Fortuny, with a curator from the Civic Museums. A water taxi to Burano for lunch at Da Romano with a Venetian writer we know who can speak to the lagoon's quieter histories. A dinner at Antiche Carampane, where the linguine alle vongole is the linguine alle vongole that everyone else's is trying to be.

The Carnival evening, when it comes, is one moment in a week of immersion. By the time our client steps out of a private gondola at the water gate of the palazzo, in costume, mask in hand, into a courtyard lit by torches, they are not arriving as a tourist. They are arriving, for one night, as the city's guest.