Perhaps more than anyone, Berengo Gardin is the photographer who told our time and our country, with a clear choice: documentation made in the round, as the great masters of the twentieth century had done before him. This volume gathers some of the celebratory moments in which his camera looked at Italy "in festa". Popular feasts have always been a precious, varied microcosm of cultural, social and traditional complexity: village fairs with merry-go-rounds and stalls, religious processions and parades of floats, dance halls and concerts in the square. Cheerful, amused, absorbed or sometimes frightened faces compose a portrait not only of a country but of man in his most intimate reality. "What a feast truly is cannot be said, only shown: that coexistence of solemnity and play, tradition and mockery, religion and transgression, bodily and spiritual, which escapes words but remains caught in the lens" (Marino Niola, citing Leopardi).