Venice Carnival offers drag queens and masked dogs

By Mathias Wildt

MILAN (Reuters Life!) - Drag queens and masked dogs competing for best outfit are some of the novelties spicing up this year's Venice carnival that opens on Friday with parades, balls, concerts and shows of every kind.

More than a million visitors will visit the city built on water over the next twelve days, vastly outnumbering the 62,000 residents of the city's historical centre.

In an effort to update the centuries-old celebration, this year the city has expanded the scope of attractions to include 30 drag queens performing to 1980s music, a parade of masked dogs, exhibitions of hunting with falcons and live outdoor theatre.

In the evenings the squares will resonate with the sounds of tango, operas, a samba marching band, Brazilian carnival dancers and concerts of all sorts of music, from Venetian ska to disco, from alternative rock to Mozart.

The carnival began centuries ago as moment of licentiousness during which Venetians could hide their identities behind masks and do as they pleased.

It was a pressure valve to ease class tensions, allowing the poor, for a brief and controlled period, to break Venice's rigid, oligarchical social order.

Yet, just as in the past, the poor may mix with the rich in the streets but will not be able to enter the exclusive events that are the carnival's highlights: the all-night masked balls in private palaces on the Grand Canal, the city's main waterway.

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