Satire and irony of the inhabitants of Putignano against the power of Mussolini during the Carnival period

The Carnival in the Fascist era assumes a singular connotation and of sure interest. In Putignano, as already enlightened above, the art of papier-mâché begins, which will become the peculiarity of the Putignano Carnival compared to all the others in Italy. The peasant form of Carnival is definitively abandoned to give way to a more bourgeois and refined identity, also supported by the artistic and satirical vein that the Putignanesi have always had.

 

During Fascism, real carnival processions were launched (what we know today as parades of allegorical floats), in line with one of the connotative symbols of the regime, the "parade". In a more or less ordered sequence, the satirical masks and the first allegorical floats run through the streets of the town, deriding in many cases the habits and customs of the Mussolini dictatorship.

 

The turning point is 1938, in full swing, with the first real allegorical float in papier-mâché. It was made by comm. Rocco Faniuolo (mest Rocch) and by the jeweler Fedele Dalessandro (F'r'lon) which was titled U purch ì nust that is "The pig is ours". The title is akin to the recent conquest of Abyssinia and the proclamation of the Empire which, according to the vision of the two Putignanesi tankmen, nurtured bright future prospects that unfortunately disillusioned in artistic terms a few years later.

 

The papier-mâché artistic scenography, which expresses the theme, featured on the wide base of the wagon a large pig ridden by a puppet with a trombone, even of important dimensions. Beside the pig, Dalessandro himself wore the butcher's clothes, while Faniuolo and others pulled various sausages and cured meats out of the mangled belly of the animal. The whole structure reaches a height of about 4-5 meters on a base about 2 meters wide. The cart passed, as was still done in those days, along the Chiancata, but arrived in one of the many alleys within the ancient village that could not go beyond Largo di Papavet, then withdrew and left via Porta Barsento.

 

After this experience it was decided to definitively move the Carnival procession to the Estramurale and to Corso Umberto I, which still exists today.