Veneto New Year – a time when the new year did not arrive in Veneto with the January frost, but with the
first light of March. A time when the calendar followed the earth, not conventions. In the
glorious Republic of Venice the year began on March 1°. It was the Cao de Ano, the real New Year’s Eve
Veneto. And it wasn’t an administrative formality: it was a symbolic, agricultural, almost cosmic act.
Because the new year begins when life begins again.
March marked the awakening of the fields, the resumption of trade, the end of winter immobility. Not
It was just about agriculture: it was a worldview.
Even today the names of the months — September, October, November, December — preserve that
ancient memory. From the Latin septem, octo, novem, decem: they were the seventh, the eighth, the ninth and the
tenth month. Because the first one was March. On the evening of March 1°, countries were transforming.
Groups of young people — the shahpas — walked the streets with cowbells, bins, horns, any object
capable of producing noise. Not music. Non-harmony. Pure noise. Wanted. Rhythmic. Almost
tribal. They stopped under the windows of the girls’ husbands. After the din, it came
the announcement: the name of a possible groom. Sometimes real. Sometimes invented. Always accompanied
from dialect nursery rhymes and collective laughter.
It was the Batimarsus. A rite of passage. A social game. A public provocation. A way
direct to say: winter is over, now we start again. It happened that the most haughty girls
unlikely suitors were attributed: old, poor, bachelors known for their meager
fortune. And then the answer came from above: buckets of water, basins, sometimes even vases from
Night. The Batimarsus had nothing refined. It was popular, rough, authentic. But inside that chaos
there was a precise order: the community recognized itself, staged itself, measured itself.
He laughed together. We grew up together. The profound meaning of noise Behind the noise lay a
archaic gesture. The noise served to: drive away the spirits of winter and ward off bad luck
“symbolically awaken” the earth to propitiate fertility and abundance Similar rites cross Europe
peasant. Sound as a magical act. The din as collective energy. The Batimarsus united
this symbolic heritage to social life: marriage, continuity, the future of the village.
As one of the major scholars of Venetian popular traditions explained to me, “the Batimarso was not
a prank, but an agrarian rite disguised as a joke. Noise was a language. It served to
remind nature —and men — that it was time to be reborn”.
Today, the Veneto New Year is commemorated in various locations with cultural events and historical reconstructions. The Batimarsus, in the
its original form, it has almost disappeared. Yet his message remains surprisingly
current. In an age that measures time in digital notifications and deadlines, that ancient idea preserves
a disarming force: the year does not begin by convention, but when the light returns to victory over the
dark.
