The 20th edition of Tocatì, the International Festival of Street Games, organised by the Associazione Giochi Antichi in collaboration with the Municipality of Verona, will be held in Verona from 15 to 18 September 2022.
To celebrate this important achievement, delegations from some international ‘Guests of Honour’ countries that have been protagonists of the event since 2003 will be attending the Festival, thus bringing back to Verona the Traditional Games and Sports that have become part of the city’s memory. A journey through time, an opportunity for meetings among different cultures that in twenty years have been involved in Tocatì, such as those of Belgium, Cyprus, Croatia, France, Greece, Iran, Mexico, Scotland, Spain, Switzerland and Hungary.
The squares and streets of Verona will be the setting for spectacular Traditional Games and Sports such as the Salto del pastor canario, a practice of the shepherds of the Canary Islands of Berber origin who use poles up to four metres long to climb, descend and move with acrobatics, or the Lotta unta di Sohos from Greece, very similar to Lotta Libera, where the contenders, before entering the field, smear their bodies with olive oil, thus making the opponent’s grasps more difficult.
Then there will be the fascinating ‘Karikàs Ostor’, the extremely long yet docile Hungarian whips in the hands of the csikòs, the Pustza whippers.
The Scottish Ba’ Game, played with a leather ball, which still divides entire villages into two teams and is practised as if the village were the field separated by an imaginary line, and the ancient Persian discipline of Zurkhaneh, a gymnasium of body and spirit in Iran, will certainly involve the entire audience.
With a mixed modality of in-person and streaming activities, during the days of the Festival these territories will take us on a discovery of their often surprising, sometimes truly spectacular traditional games and sports.
Plato claimed that one can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation: how much can one discover about an entire community in three days of Tocatì?
