From 17 to 19 September 2021, the XIX edition of Tocatì, the International Festival of Games in the street, will take place in Verona. It is organized by Associazione Giochi Antichi (AGA) under the patronage of the Municipality of Verona, the Veneto Region and the Province of Verona.
Reconfirmed for this nineteenth edition the collaboration with AEJeST and further strengthened the one with MiC and ICPI – Central Institute for the Intangible Heritage.
Oceans of navigating explorers, fishermen lakes, streams that feed mills, rivers that transport people, rain that irrigates fields.
In one word: Water. All great civilizations rose on water, a necessary element for life. The sea can unite or divide peoples, a river can facilitate exchange: any place where two cultures meet, or clash, they generate something new. And so even games become a vehicle of ancient traditions and to trace the maps of their journeys means
to draw the most light-hearted and authentic past of human societies.
Even Verona owes its origin to water: the bend of the river Adige holds the millenary stratification that earned the city the recognition of the UNESCO World Heritage.
Here, after over a year of pandemic, the 19th edition of Tocatì returns for people to leave their houses and join in the squares to play together safely.
If last year’s edition was an all-Italian one, the 2021 Festival welcomes international guests once again. Not just one as is tradition, but four, united by the common denominator of water: France, Belgium, Croatia and Cyprus, the Countries that supported Tocatì’s nomination to the UNESCO Register of Good Practices for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage.
With a system mixed between live and in streaming activities, during the Festival these territories will lead us in the discovery of their traditional games and sports with strong ties to water, often surprising, sometimes truly spectacular.
Plato said that you can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation: how much can we find out about a whole community in three days of Tocatì?