Simona and I ran through the doors of the cinema just minutes after 9pm. We have a knack of arriving late at the community cinema where we volunteer a mere 10 minutes before the show starts, but more often than not it’s not a problem. No self-respecting Italian would arrive at a movie more than 5 minutes before it begins and the films always start at least 10 minutes late, so if you subtract the 10, carry the two and divide it by Π, we show that mathematically, we actually arrive early. Can’t argue with mathematics.

After setting the reel whirling up in the projectionist’s booth, Rewik came down and talked about a medieval festival in a town called Brisighella that his new girlfriend had been urging him to go to. Brisighella, a few kilometers outside of Bologna, is an ancient town that holds an annual festival filled with food and entertainment from ages past. One of the first things Simona told me about the area is that the specialty of the region is baby pig cooked on a spit and served with the head still attached. Mmmmm mmmmm.

The description of the festival was enough to inspire the two hour drive to Brisighella, a town barely bigger than my home town of Casina. The most striking feature of the town is the towering cliff that encompasses one side of the town and is capped with a clock tower, massive castle, and a church lined up along the edge.

The festival started off with drummers, then some battles between armored knights and knife fighters. There were several stages in various piazzas throughout the town and the drummers would wander from one to the next as a way of announcing where the next show would begin.

I’m usually a fan of a drum group breaking out the funk but these guys just drolled on for 10 minutes of “One two three four one two three-and-four-and one two three four one two three-and-four-and one…” until the show started. The funk was replaced by white boy grade school drum line.

I love festival food. A hot meal slopped on a plastic plate with the gentleness of a train wreck might be my favorite genre of food. Some like Chinese, others like Italian. I like Festival. Simo got some sausage something or other, but I picked mine just from the name alone: castrato stufato con polenta bianca that literally means, “Castrated and stuffed (pork) with white polenta.” I mean, how could you turn down something like that? It was fantastic. You haven’t had pork until you’ve had dickless stuffed pork.

Night fell and the stage acts involved more fire and pyrotechnics with the only safety precautions being, “Watch out for the fire raining over your head.” We watched a street play that neither of us understood and then a procession led by 12’ high angel, sun, moon, and other characters and the crowd followed behind them to the main piazza. Nearly all of the characters had some sort of pyrotechnic attached to themselves, but the way they handled them you’d think that their pyrotechnic expert was picked by whoever selected the short straw down at the bar last Saturday night. Hanging a string of roman candles upside down over a piazza filled with people or dragging a spherical cage on a cart covered with mini roman candles through the crowd of people probably weren’t their most planned out ideas.

The evening finished with a giant battle between day and night, or at least that what it looked like. It was entitled, “L’universo della chanson de Roland,” and after reading about it on Wikipedia, I still have no idea what it was about. There was lots of fire, though.

All in all, it was a fun festival in a very pretty town. I did hear comments about it being better organized in years past, which was my only complaint about this year. It seemed like a festival with lots of potential and just had crappy organizers. I wouldn’t mind heading back next year — if not only to gross out Simona while eating baby pig on a spit.