If the thoughts of rampaging selfie-stick wielding tourists, underwhelming cultural displays and overpriced living conditions appeal to you, then you’ve come to the right festival.

Personally, though, being elbowed into submission by crowds of raging day-trippers didn’t do much for me.

When it first occurred to me that I would be in Venice for Carnevale, I was ecstatic. Here was a festival I could get behind — steeped in history and tradition, that embodied cultural acts from yesteryear. A city alive with celebration, art, music and movement — so different from my own.

Instead, I found my prior assumptions and expectations to be terribly, completely, wrong. Before I dive into the reasons behind my disappointment, let’s quickly delve into an abridged history.

Different sources give us a range of dates for when ‘Carnevale’ as we know it actually started. The word itself was first used in official documents to describe a series of festivities in 1094, by the then Doge, Vitale Falier.

Actually, to say that they were festivities is a bit of a misnomer. They were more a subsidiary of the Roman pane et circenses — i.e. a thrown bone to the poor, used to pacify and distract them from how disgustingly loaded the rich were. Public amusements would have been staged — nothing too groundbreaking.

Around this time, the practice of covering one’s face took hold. No one knows exactly why this tradition began. Some theorize that it was most likely in defiant response to one of the most exacting class hierarchies in Europe — if your face was masked, and you were in costume, no one could tell if you were a pauper or a nobleman.

Others suppose that it was a way to avoid the consequences of the law. The Venetian authorities prohibited a whole range of exciting activities (gambling, whoring, throwing eggs) ((seriously)), so masked young men had the perfect accessory to hide their identities when committing these heinous crimes.

In seems only fitting that in light of recent Australian political events (#eggboy go you good thing go), I should include this rather hilarious fact I stumbled upon during my Carnevale experience.

If a young Venetian man fancied a young woman during the 14th century, he could partake of the ovi odoriferi – – literally the scented eggs — which, legend has it, was introduced by explorer Marco Polo after his jaunt to China.

These young men would fill the eggshells with rosewater or perfume, and lob them at the subject of their desire. 14th century flirting, everyone.

As with most cultural practices undertaken by young men, this seemingly sweet idea degenerated rather quickly.

They would fill eggs with all sorts of horrific things, including ink, and street waste, which is when the law began to get involved. The local police in San Marco built nets around the Piazza, to shelter the nobles from flying eggs!

Luckily, this practice stopped a long time ago, and now, the only thing people throw during Carnevale is confetti. Usually at you, which is exactly what you want when you, your friends, and your hangovers are stumbling your way to the nearest pizzeria. Thank you so much, random stranger.

I don’t mean to posit that the entire Carnevale experience is shite, because, well, it’s not. There are parties every night, which can lead to you having a confetti fight with your inebriated friends at 3.00am in an empty San Marco’s Square.

People all over the city dress up in ornate costumes, which makes the entire city feel like it’s a masked ball.

And there are some smaller festivities on the minor islands – Lido, Burano and Murano – that seem to be more celebrated by locals, and less invaded by moaning tourists.

Every international student I’ve spoken to here seems to come to a general consensus – – the parades are interesting, but we were all expecting more. More events, more planning, more parades, more everything. Some elements were quaint and exciting, like the evening parade on the water:

Whilst others, like the Volo dell’angelo, the flight of the angel, was really not worth getting out of bed for – – a costumed woman on a zipline floating in the air for a minute to Bowie’s ‘Space Oddity’ does not a cultural event make, in my humble opinion:

The Venetian Carnevale has been so hyped-up and so over-inflated that I think we, as a global community, forget that Venice is a simply a small town (53,000 residents as of January 2019) hosting celebrations for approximately three million visitors over the period of Carnevale. Venice can’t adapt, or build new infrastructure, to accommodate such a huge volume of travelers – the city doesn’t work that way – – and so this huge influx leads to mobility problems, and concerns for public safety, which rather places a dampener on things.

So celebrate Carnevale for what it is, not what it’s perceived to be – – otherwise you’ll leave feeling short-changed. It’s an opportunity for local artists and craftspeople to showcase their work to the world, whilst continuing an eggcellent tradition that (technically), only dates back to 1979.