The Red night is a  celebration held in Volterra Italy every year. You may be familiar with the concept through the book ‘New Moon’ In the Twilight series, though i can assure you it is nothing like the book or movie portrays.  While it is called the red night, you don’t actually wear red. Throughout all the town, restaurants,shops, museums, performances, musicians, food and wine tastings are open and happening from 9 pm until midnight. These business’s or buildings that are part of the even are marked with red carpets on the street so you know who was participating, but the streets were also filled with things to do.

The first event we saw was these flag throwers and drummers and pipers in the Piazza del Priori (The main Piazza in Volterra). It was an amazing experience, and the best thing i can compare it to is like Pipe bands in North America, with sword dancers or something of the like. You could hear the drums echoing down the small streets from everywhere in the city, and at first we had no idea what was going on and had to run to the piazza. The Flag dancers were juggling with multiples of these full sized flags, throwing them in the air, and twisting them in between their feet and kicking them up again. Some of the performances they worked together and threw the flags to each other, and these were my favourite to watch. They all interacted perfectly with each other and it was truly stunning.

When the flag performance ended in the piazza we wandered around to some of the museums and galleries that were open (They were also all free, so that was an added bonus). We went into the city hall (pictured above) as well as an art museum that had a lot of Bisantine looking Madonna and child paintings. The art museums was really interesting, and was my first real experience in Italy looking at this kind of work. Its an amazing feeling looking at all this work in person after looking and learning about it in textbooks for so long; even if it was just a few dozen Madonna and child.

After the museums and Galleries we wandered around to find great musicians and street performances. The band pictured here was a bunch of older gentleman walking around the whole town playing catchy upbeat music on their brass instruments and were so lively. They joined in the crowd and tried to get people involved and looked so happy doing it. A few minutes walk from them we had found a drum group in a small corner, and had unfortunately only caught the last part of their performance; but what we did was fantastic. The Group consisted of it think 5 drummers (maybe 6) all on different drums. The music was loud, and moving, and you couldn’t help but tap your feet and move along with the beat. In the middle of the song they moved off of their drums and used the environment around them and it still sounded amazing. It was unique and not like something i had seen before, and so adaptive of them I guess you could say.

All in all Notte Rosso  was such a culturally enriching and fantastic experience. It showcased some of the best talent found in Volterra, and some of the great historical aspects.