Venice Carnival closes on Shrove Tuesday, which falls on 9 February 2027, and the modern event runs for roughly ten days before that. Its documented history begins with a 1094 edict of Doge Vitale Falier granting the right to celebrate carnival in the run-up to Lent, although the historian who cites it notes that the veracity of the early accounts cannot be established with certainty (Bertrand, 2020, p. 81).
What followed was less a party than a piece of government. From the fourteenth century the Republic used carnival to commemorate victories, to hold its neighbourhoods together and to advertise itself to visiting princes. Fat Thursday centred on a mock trial and slaughter of twelve pigs in the Ducal Palace, a ritual that ran until the Republic fell in 1797 (Bertrand, 2020, p. 84). By the eighteenth century the state watched the masked season for about four months of the year rather than the ten days before Lent (Bertrand, 2020, p. 88).
The carnival you can attend today is a modern reconstruction. It restarted on Burano in 1967, two centuries after the last carnival of the Republic, and became an official programme in 1979 and 1980 under the municipality, the Scuola Grande di San Marco and La Biennale (Santoro and Massiani, 2014, p. 79). The first modern edition, from 14 to 18 February 1980, drew an estimated 200,000 people.
When is Venice Carnival 2027?
The closing date is fixed by the church calendar, so it moves every year. In 2027 Ash Wednesday falls on 10 February and Easter Sunday on 28 March (United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, 2026). That makes Shrove Tuesday, Martedi Grasso in Italian, 9 February 2027, and Fat Thursday, Giovedi Grasso, 4 February 2027. Carnival always ends on Shrove Tuesday, the day before Lent begins.
The opening date is set by the organisers rather than by the calendar, and it has moved a great deal. The modern festival is compressed into about ten days leading up to Lent (Bertrand, 2020, p. 79), but the recorded editions vary widely: the first modern carnival ran five days, from 14 to 18 February 1980, the 1989 edition ran a full month from 7 January to 7 February, and most editions between 1995 and 2008 ran eleven or twelve days (Santoro and Massiani, 2014, pp. 78-79).
In practice this means the last weekend and Shrove Tuesday itself are fixed points you can book around, while the opening weekend depends on the programme the city publishes for that year. Weather matters more than the programme for how crowded it feels, because the audience is dominated by day trips (Santoro and Massiani, 2014, p. 79).
Where Venice Carnival came from: the 1094 edict
The document scholars have cited since the nineteenth century is an edict of Doge Vitale Falier, dated 1094, granting the right to celebrate carnival in the run-up to Lent, the carnis laxatio. Bertrand quotes it and immediately adds that the veracity of some of the accounts handed down about early carnival cannot be established with certainty (2020, p. 81), which is a warning worth repeating whenever you see 1094 given as a foundation date.
Twelfth-century carnival in Venice probably looked like carnival anywhere else on the Mediterranean: eating and drinking heavily, wearing a mask, insulting your neighbours, pelting them with eggs and fruit, and singing songs full of political or sexual innuendo (Bertrand, 2020, p. 81). The city legislated against the results. A ban on egg throwing was issued in 1268, a law of 12 February 1339 denounced past misdemeanours committed by maskers, and a law of 1458 forbade men from masking as women to enter female monasteries.
Violence was part of the season for centuries. Bull hunts were permitted from the first day of carnival, 26 December, to the last Sunday of the season, until a spectators' platform collapsed at Campo Santo Stefano in 1802. The stick and fist fights between the Castellani and the Nicolotti factions on the Ponte dei Pugni continued until 1705, when they were branded as brawls and suppressed (Bertrand, 2020, p. 82).
Giovedi Grasso: the twelve pigs and the wooden castles
The strangest ritual in the Venetian year was the state ceremony of Fat Thursday, and it explains why carnival mattered to the government. It commemorated the supposed defeat in 1162 of the patriarch of Aquileia and his twelve canons by Doge Vitale II Michiel. The patriarch's freedom was bought with an annual tribute of twelve pigs, standing for the twelve canons, and twelve large loaves, with a bull added from 1312 (Bertrand, 2020, p. 84).
Every year the pigs were tried by a court in the Ducal Palace, in a hall where small wooden castles with crenellated towers were erected to represent the castles of Friuli that the patriarch had once controlled. The sentence was carried out on the Piazzetta beside the basilica, where blacksmiths and butchers slaughtered and cut up the animals. The meat went to the senators and the bread to the prisoners, and the doge and senators then returned to the palace to demolish the wooden castles. The ritual ran until 1797.
The Republic gradually cleaned it up. After Friuli was annexed in 1420 the tribute was performed by the Venetian government rather than symbolically by the patriarch, as it had been since 1222 (Bertrand, 2020, p. 85). From 1520 pigs no longer entered the Ducal Palace, in 1525 their public execution was replaced by that of oxen officially called bulls, and after 1550 Fat Thursday became a public spectacle staged for the city and for foreign visitors (Bertrand, 2020, p. 86).
The Flight of the Angel and the other set pieces
The best known event of the modern programme is older than most visitors assume. The Flight of the Angel, in which a performer descends on a cable from the campanile into Piazza San Marco, was created by a Turkish tightrope walker in 1558. After an accident in 1759 the acrobat was replaced by a wooden dove (Bertrand, 2020, p. 86). It returned to the modern carnival after more than two hundred years of absence, and has since been joined by a flight of the lion and a flight of the eagle (Bertrand, 2020, p. 96).
Fat Thursday carried several other set pieces. There was a fireworks display and a moresca, a dance miming a struggle between Christians and Moors or Turks, alongside the Forze d'Ercole, or Hercules's Strength, in which men climbed onto each other's shoulders to build human pyramids on the Piazzetta. The pyramids survived the fall of the Republic and were abolished six years after a crush between the Nicolotti and the Castellani on 31 May 1810 that killed around a dozen people (Bertrand, 2020, p. 82).
A mid-Lent ritual called the Vecchia, in which a masked effigy of an old woman was cut open and burned in Campo San Luca, outlasted several of these. Together they show a festival built on staged combat and public execution rather than on the costume promenade that represents carnival today.
What the Republic allowed maskers to do
By the eighteenth century the state was supervising masks for about four months of the year, well beyond the ten days before Lent (Bertrand, 2020, p. 88). The authorised season ran from the beginning of October to Advent, from the Feast of Saint Stephen on 26 December to Shrove Tuesday, and for the fortnight around the Feast of the Ascension. A French visitor wrote in 1739, with what Bertrand calls slight exaggeration, that one could count about six months when everyone in Venice went about masked (2020, pp. 88-89).
This was regulation rather than licence. Council of Ten edicts were repeated throughout the period prohibiting maskers from carrying weapons, gambling to excess, wearing luxurious clothing, entering monasteries and churches, wandering about at night and dressing as women (Bertrand, 2020, p. 91). Masking was banned outright at Christmas and Easter, and inside gambling houses and churches, from a law of 1268 onwards, with an exception from 1776 that let girls mask whenever they went to the theatre (Comune di Venezia, 2022).
The mask could also be compulsory. Ten years after the private gambling rooms were closed in 1628, the government opened the public Ridotto di San Moise, where players had to wear masks, play in silence and on authorised days, while the bankers were chosen from unmasked patricians to limit fraud (Bertrand, 2020, p. 91). The trade behind all this was small: 31 mask makers in twelve workshops in 1773 (Comune di Venezia, 2022).
Was Venice Carnival banned by Napoleon?
The short answer is that the ban was real but shorter and messier than the usual story. Bertrand records the received account among specialists, that carnival was prohibited by the French and Austrian authorities from 1797 to 1848, briefly returned in unified Italy in 1867 and then evaporated (2020, p. 78), and then spends much of the article qualifying it.
His own dates are narrower. France ruled Venice in 1797 and again from 1805 to 1814, Austria from 1797 to 1805, from 1815 to 1848 and from 1849 to 1866. The suppression proper was a moralising pause from 1802 to 1816, aimed at the entertainments judged most dangerous to public order. Balls, spectacles and masquerades came back in the 1820s, though street performance and the bauta costume did not (Bertrand, 2020, p. 92). The one political carnival of the century came in the winter of 1867, in the presence of Garibaldi and the king's son.
After that the festive year moved to the summer. The Festa del Redentore took over on the third Sunday in July, the Biennale was established in 1895, and the bucentaur, the doge's state barge, was stripped of its mast and turned into a floating penitentiary (Bertrand, 2020, p. 93). Carnival survived indoors, in private balls such as the Longhi ball of 1913 and the Palazzo Labia ball of 3 September 1951 (Bertrand, 2020, p. 95).
How many people come to Venice Carnival, and what it costs the city
Carnival restarted on Burano in 1967 as a spontaneous local event, two centuries after the last carnival of the Republic, and became institutional in 1979 and 1980 (Santoro and Massiani, 2014, p. 79). Bertrand traces the same return through the Vogalonga regatta of 1974, the success of Fellini's Casanova in 1976 and a floating theatre moored in the basin in 1979, before carnival came back in 1980 as a spectacle under a stage and film director (2020, p. 95).
The audience figures the organisers recorded are far smaller than the numbers repeated online. La Biennale ran the first modern edition from 14 to 18 February 1980 for an estimated 200,000 people, followed by 500,000 in 1981 and 800,000 in 1982. The peak was about one million in 1992 and again in 1993, on the largest budgets in the series. The 1991 edition was cancelled for the First Gulf War (Santoro and Massiani, 2014, pp. 78-79).
Counting only the visitors carnival adds to a normal February, the event brings 18,000 to 34,000 extra hotel arrivals and 250,000 to 500,000 extra day trips, against roughly 4.1 million arrivals and 12 million day visitors a year for the city (Santoro and Massiani, 2014, p. 81). It costs the local authority 1.56 to 2.27 million euros a year, including extra trains, street cleaning and policing, and returns 12.2 to 15.5 million euros in benefits. The authors add that they could not price the crowding, which is the cost residents raise (2014, pp. 80-85).
