As virus recedes, the party returns
Two years after the pandemic shut down the Carnival in the French Riviera city of Nice, artists, florists, actors, technicians and drivers are putting the final touches on their costumes, lavish flower arrangements and giant floats set to roll down the city’s famed bou- levards and squares.
It will be a loud, rich and crowded chain of events over the next two weeks. The Carnival’s 149th edition is led by the King of Animals, celebrating nature, light, hu- man connection and life itself after months of lock- downs, social distancing and banned public gatherings.
“It’s rejuvenation,” said Nicole Bravi, the director of the florist association, La Nouvelle Vague, that has been designing flower arrangements for the Carnival floats for 20 years. Flowers are a prominent part of the Nice Carnival and feature in their own parade known as the Battle of Flowers. Traditionally, people throw flowers at the spectators, but this year they decided to hand them out to people. “It’s to express our desire to reconnect with people,” Bravi said. “There has been so much grief and nostalgia and melancholy that we just want to give people some beauty back.”
The Nice Carnival is part of a European medieval carnival tradition, and the city’s two-week festival of excess in costumes, food and music is one of the world biggest, after those in Venice, Rio de Janeiro and Mardi Gras in New Orleans.
Public celebrations in the city on the French Mediter- ranean coast started in the early 19th century to ho- nour visiting nobility. There were street battles in which people pelted one another with flour and eggs. By the late 1800s a modern version of the Carnival emerged after the local painter, Alexis Mossa designed grotesque characters and put them on floats.
The Carnival is a rare event in the French republic that offers a chance for royalty to return. In line with this year’s theme, the king and queen have human faces perched on animal bodies — and giant crowns, of course. They will be overseeing their subjects in the city’s main Massena Square until the end of the month when they will be burned and buried.
Political leaders need not feel shunned. Candidates for April’s presidential election are featured as well. Their giant faces are perched on the bodies of crabs.
“They are in a basket of crabs,” said Pierre Povigna, a fourth-generation “carnivalier” from Nice, whose family has designed the royal floats for decades. “It’s a famous dish, le panier des crabes, a crab basket,” he explained. But before serving it, crabs are put in a basket and they turn on one another, they go after one another with their claws, he said.