Tuesday, September 1, 2009

Doing As The Romans Did

In August, we were fortunate enough to be in Fano during the Fano Dei Cesari (Fano of the Caesars), an annual event where the entire town gets dressed up in togas and celebrates their Ancient Roman roots. This year marked the 2,000th birthday of the the Arco di Augusto. (Take a moment...that means it was built in 9 A.D... and it's still standing..)

Each part of the city is broken down into a different color. During the week, the shop owners dress all the store windows with their district color, and the mannequins in togas. All the restaurants create menus in Latin with Roman dishes. Since we're in the district near the sea we were blue and "Delfino" (the dolphins). On the weekend, the town holds a variety of events such as a Gladiator fight, a chariot race and big Roman dinner.

We were also fortunate enough to have our friends from London, Katherine and Rob book a mini vacation to Fano that very weekend. Since we had such a big group, we decided to have a big group dinner in the piazza and watch the parade of each quarter march through the city.

Here are a few photos from the event. If you want to see the rest of the photos, click here and more videos including our big cenone, click here

The track for the chariot races

Team Delfino!

Team America!

Making Roman crepes

To say they take it seriously is an understatement

Little lady who was part of the parade

Team America, part 2

Many groups had wagons in the parade filled with food. The silver bag on the left is covering a huge vat of wine that they all drank from while they were waiting to walk. And yes, that is a huge roasted pig on a carving table.

After all the festivities, there is a huge party down on the beach.

Below is video of the burgundy group waiting for the parade to start. In true Italian fashion, they chant about soccer but, I'll let you figure out what exactly they're saying!

4 comments:

Vanessa said...

Oh, I envy you...

Peter at italyMONDO! said...

Too fun! is this a set time every year? I'd love to travel north to see something like this.

Em and GC said...

@ Peter- More or less the same time, around the first week week in August. It is definitely a sight to see!

Q, La, and Gooner said...

Wow, I'm a little envious as well YET, I'm not quite sure if I'm ready to sport a toga in public.

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