Goodbye to meat
The word carnival probably comes from the Latin carne levare, to take away meat. In Catholic countries, carnival was the last burst of feasting and fun before the forty days of Lent, when many people gave up meat. It was a time when normal rules were turned upside down: people wore MASKS, servants mocked their masters, and anyone could pretend to be anyone else.
Carnival travelled wherever Catholic Europeans went, and in the Americas it mixed with the music, dance and costume traditions of Africa and of the Indigenous peoples, and the biggest carnivals today are in the Caribbean and South America.
The biggest party on Earth
RIO de Janeiro's carnival in BRAZIL is often called the biggest in the world, with millions of people dancing in the streets over several days. Its centrepiece is the competition between samba schools, community groups, many from the poorer hillside neighbourhoods, which spend the whole year preparing. Each school has around an hour to PARADE through the Sambadrome, a long avenue lined with stands built in 1984 and designed by the architect Oscar Niemeyer, with thousands of DANCERS, giant floats, DRUMS and a single SAMBA song written for the year. Judges score them on everything from the RHYTHM of the drummers to the costumes, and the results are announced on television like a football final.
Masks, oranges and snipped ties
In VENICE, carnival was famous for centuries for its masks, which let people of any class mix without being recognised. The Venetian carnival faded away after the city lost its independence in 1797, and it was only revived in 1979. In the Belgian town of Binche, men called Gilles, in wax masks and ostrich-feather hats, dance through the streets on the last day of carnival throwing oranges into the crowd, a tradition on the United Nations cultural heritage list since 2003. In Cologne, on the Thursday before Lent, women traditionally snip off the ties of any men they meet. Today visitors in elaborate masks and gowns fill St Mark's Square.
Steel drums in Trinidad
TRINIDAD's carnival began with masked balls held by French plantation owners in the late 1700s, which enslaved people were not allowed to join. After slavery ended in the 1830s, freed Africans made carnival their own, and it became the heart of the island's culture. In the 1930s and 1940s, Trinidadians invented the steelpan, a musical instrument hammered out of old oil drums and tuned to play melodies; it is often called the only new acoustic instrument invented in the twentieth century. Our instruments page covers many others.
London's carnival
Trinidadian and other Caribbean families who came to Britain brought carnival with them. In 1959 the Trinidadian activist Claudia Jones organised an indoor Caribbean carnival in London, and in 1966 a street festival began in Notting Hill. It is now one of the biggest street festivals in Europe, drawing around a million people over the August bank holiday, with sound systems, steel bands and costume bands winding through west London. SEQUINS, a HEADDRESS of FEATHERS, PERFORMERS on STILTS, a COLOURFUL COSTUME and a JOYFUL CROWD at the PROCESSION make it a SPECTACLE of a FESTIVAL.