WANDERING through the lake-front handcrafts market last Sunday, I bumped into Esmeralda and Pippi Longstocking. Later that afternoon, on my way to gainful employ at the Olympic Stadium in Rome, I came across Pongo from 101 Dalmatians.
It is Carnevale time again in Italy, that time of year thou mayst behold the young (and, in places like Venice, not so young) dressed in a splendid variety of sumptuous wear. According to the ecclesiastical calendar, Carnevale is the period between Epiphany and Lent, the last celebration before the Lenten fast.
According to the modern lay calendar, Carnevale is the period when hundreds of thousands of Italian families go into post-Christmas crisis as they confront the Great Debate about what little Gianni or cute Alessia is going to wear this year. Can we get another go out of last year's costume or do we have to fork out big money for a new one?
Carnevale is the time of year when the Italian cult of La Bella Figura is taken to an entirely logical extreme, an extreme which can prove confusing for the Northern European. For example, take Italy's most famous Carnevale in Venice.
Ten years ago I braved the freezing mist and rain of Venice in search of the glories of the Carnevale. I went looking for the "show", the "pageant", the "street entertainment" but found nothing, or almost nothing.
People just seemed to be standing around in St Mark's Square for hours, cold notwithstanding, as tourist after tourist took snapshots. Admittedly these people were dressed in magnificent 17th or 18th century-style costumes and, in the unique setting of Venice, they looked splendid.
Yet, the meddling northern European intellect kept asking when would the show start, when does the curtain go, when do they actually do something, when does the crack begin? In time, of course, and after beginning to learn native ways, I realised that this was the show.
The whole point is to stand around and look beautiful. That is enough. Indeed, I sometimes suspect that for a certain Mediterranean mind, "looking beautiful" is the summum bonum.
So for the next week, up and down the entire Italian peninsula, children will be lavishly decked out in splendid costumes designed for prolonged weekend exhibition in the nearest, most crowded piazza. Given that modernity has absorbed and transformed nearly all Italian peasant folklore such as Carnevale, the costumes that children wear today inevitably come straight out of Walt Disney with Aladdin, the Little Mermaid, Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse, Zorro, the Beast and so on, taking to the piazza in their thousands.
At first glance, the Anglo-Saxon mind might conclude that Carnevale is some form of fancy dress competition. Wrong. Carnevale is not about improvised, low-cost originality that cobbles together a Power Rangers outfit from aluminium oven paper, toilet roll and glue. Carnevale is about looking good and about paying for your child to look good. (A costume from Stefano Nicalao of Venice costs $1,000.)
Last year, Italian parents at our child Roisin's English-language international school found it hard to understand when a child dressed up as a teapot won the Carnevale dress competition. The English mind which judged that competition probably felt, correctly enough, that the teapot outfit had been the most original and maybe the one on which most family time, energy and kitchen scissoring had been invested.
Italian mothers just called it ugly and wondered how it had won a prize.
Such cultural confusion is not limited to the northern European. This time last year when looking for a Carnevale costume for Roisin, we came across a splendid item which the shopkeeper assured us was Irish. It consisted of a black satin overdress lined with gold and silver sequins touched off with lots of ribbons and a satin headband lined with more gold sequins. No green. Not a shamrock.
We bought it, of course ... but if that dress is Irish, then that sort of Irish never did reach the rural Co Derry of my youth. Neither did Carnevale.