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The CARNIVAL is a famous festival at Rome, and we will take one peep at its gaieties before we bid a farewell to the great city. It begins after Christmas day, and presents a succession of lively and fantastic scenes. This revelry takes place in one of the public streets. The windows and balconies are hung with rich draperies, and filled with gay spectators. Crowds of people, masked and unmasked, parade on the pavements; and two rows of carriages, close behind each other, make a continual promenade.
9. The crowd carry on a war, by pelting each other with large handfuls of what ought to be sugar plums. As these, however, are too expensive, the articles used are a kind of plaster comfits, the dust from which completely whitenthe garments of the combatants.
10. Every day of the masquerade, the scene becomes more and more crowded and animated On the last, the number of the masks is much increased, the skirmishes of sweetmeats and limt dust become vastly spirited, and the shouts of joy and revelry almost exceed description. The revel ends with extinguishing the carnival just before dark, when all the masks appear with lighted tapers, each striving to blow out his neighbour's candle, and to keep in his own. The whole of this is amusing in the highest degree to those who partake of it.
11. In former times, the masking of the carnival used to be much more splendid than it is at present. Oriental kings, followed by trains of slaves; cars of victory, with laurel-crowned heroes; Roman processions, and triumphant Bacchus, with his crew of fauns and drunken revellers, were represented by the more wealthy and fashionable of the crowd.
11. What is said of masking?
12. The amusements of the carnival are always preceded by a publie execution. If any criminals are destined to capital punishment, they are reserved for this sad occasion. The object of this is to hold out to the populace the terror of the law, in order to restrain them from the commission of crimes, to which the unbounded license of the festival might otherwise lead. A number of penitents attend these unhappy men to the scaffold, in melancholv procession.

Tales about Rome and modern Italy - Old Humphrey - 1839

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