ABSTRACT
Early modern Italian cities had many public festivals that sent food and fists flying. Carnival time was the most popular, but others, like Bologna’s annual Feast of the Roast Pig (Festa della Porchetta) on 24 August, the Day of St. Bartholomew, were no less chaotic. Bologna’s premier balladeer and broadsheet writer, Giulio Cesare Croce, caught the public imagination with accounts like the one below that conveyed the Porchetta’s full carnivalesque energy, and hinted at the ever more elaborate spectacles that would mark the day until French armies put an end to many such early modern rituals in 1796:
