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Winter reaches its final hours, the sun returns to fill the sky, hinting at the imminent spring, and in a frenzied week people pour into the squares, unleashing their imagination in a thousand costumes, overturning social order and sometimes even the moral one: it is understandable how Carnival, especially the Italian one, has always exerted an irresistible charm on Northern writers (particularly those from the Protestant area), sometimes transforming into empathy and daydreaming. The Germans call it "Fernweh", which is the opposite of nostalgia, a disruptive desire to be elsewhere, traveling at least with the mind so far as to give the impression of having already arrived at the much-desired destination.
It is no coincidence, therefore, that the most beautiful story about the Roman Carnival (and in general one of the most beautiful about Carnival in general) has come to us from one of the best voices Germany has ever generated, Ernest Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann, who had never set foot in Italy in his life. Hoffmann had literally devoured the travel accounts of his contemporaries in Italy, especially Goethe's famous one, so much so as to make the narrated experiences his own and manage to describe a Rome of the early 1800s extremely lively and real, capable of fully engaging the reader in one of the author's most successful phantasmagorias. Those familiar with the creator of "The Night Pieces" and "The Devil's Elixirs" know that his stories are splendid labyrinths, intricate games of mirrors where nothing has a stable form, things and people show a dual nature, constantly oscillating between two extremes (reality and fantasy, man and automaton, person and character...), just as the stories themselves, lost between straightforward realism and sudden leaps into wonder, where the comic suddenly turns tragic and vice versa, where in the light of day the shadow of the truest fear can slither (Poe knew something about this, as he never hid his admiration for the German writer). Hoffmann's stories thus populate with "Doppelgänger" (true doubles of the characters, acting in their shadow), secondary plots, stories that intertwine and reveal each other.
The Roman carnival becomes, in this respect, an incredibly prolific backdrop for Hoffmann's imagination, but also the main protagonist of one of his most intricate and disconcerting tales, a true and exceedingly pleasant tour de force for the mind ("Those to whom Princess Brambilla doesn’t make their head spin, have no head at all!" Heinrich Heine said in this regard), an impossible story to summarize, but one that in its progression succeeds in pulling the numerous threads previously woven into a marvelous vision of the whole. The story of the seamstress Giacinta and her suitor, the actor Giglio Fava, is complicated by the charm exerted by a mysterious and extremely rich carnival costume, its strange relation with the passage in Rome of two exotic princes (the Assyrian Prince Cornelio and the Ethiopian Princess Brambilla) who appear and disappear from the baroque palaces of the capital in enigmatic processions, on floats full of insane objects. The prince and the princess then seem to be nothing more than the protagonists of a singular legend from One Thousand and One Nights (that of the Urdar fountain) that flows like an underground river throughout the unfolding of the short novel, to which are added sudden transformations, appearances of typical Italian carnival characters (from Harlequin to Pantalone), each with their own story to tell, each also portrayed with loving and admirable realism in their own context, with their own personality and passions, sinister events that seem to fade like the worst nightmares, and endless chases in the whirl of Carnival, where simply wearing the mask seems to open up an entire universe of meanings. Moving the strings of all the stories and all the characters, like a vaguely Luciferian puppeteer, is the charlatan Celionati, one of the most amusing and disturbing figures ever created by Hoffmann.
And when at the end of the story one understands the nature of the Urdar fountain, where everyone can reflect, understanding how life is representation, there is the feeling of having walked in a circle to return to the starting point, but with a completely different view, like discovering a new world just around the corner. If the device may seem trivial, do not be deceived: after all, it could only be yet another Carnival prank...
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