A drunk bear, covered in honey and chicken feathers. Welcome to Carnival in Roero.
The room
2 adults + 1 child or 3 adults
1 double bed or 2 twin beds 
En-suite bathroom with accessible shower
Km0 breakfast included
Air conditioning
Ground floor
Accessible
Free Wi-FiDirect access to the breakfast room and the courtyard. Underfloor heating. Electric kettle and herbal teas provided. Hairdryer. Smart TV. Window screens.
Available on request: extra bed or travel cot and bedguard rail for small children.
The room Fè Balè l’Urs in Roero is on the ground floor, designed for people with reduced mobility: floor level walk-in shower, grab rails, direct access to the courtyard and the breakfast room. The bed can be configured as a double, 160×190, or as two twin beds, 80×190.
Fe balè l’urs
Making the bear dance
During the Carnival, a young man was dressed up as a bear and paraded through the town streets with a chain around his neck. It was a purification ritual, a facing of the town’s primal fears.
In the farmer’s ritual calendar, the festival that struck the collective imagination most powerfully was undoubtedly the Carnival. Indeed, these were days of excesses and fun, where people reveled in the desire and, above all, the universally accepted possibility in the community to do what was not allowed the rest of the year.
The farmers drank, ate, the youths danced: they indulged in things that were normally limited by economic constraints or by the subduing action of the Church. This tradition stemmed from propitiatory rituals related to a delicate time of transition: winter was almost over and nature was ready to awaken.
A widespread custom was to represent the Carnival by means of animals such as turkeys, goats and bears: symbols of the rural character of the rituals of this period, but also among the oldest forms of Carnival personification. These Carnival allegories were often killed (in the case of the goat and the turkey) or, in the case of the bear, their image was dramatized in a scenario where its menacing symbolism was used in a farcical key, with the intention of mocking it as representation of the community’s domination of the threat. The image of the bear was, in fact, used as an allegory for evil, and by mocking and defeating it in a theatrical, celebratory way, the community was “purified” in anticipation of the new production cycle.
In Montà, the custom of Fe Balé l’Urs (making the bear dance) was still in use until the middle of the last century. On Carnival days a young man would be cartoonishly decked out in animal skins and dragged through the streets of the village with a chain around his neck. During the parade through the village, the disguised man imitated the animal’s grunts and movements, bothered passers-by, and alternated between ready obedience to the master-dominators who held him by the collar and feigned rebellion, attempting to escape and evade the master’s control.
There was also an even more grotesque version of a “Bear” without animal skins disguise: a man drunk on wine, his skin smeared with honey to make thousands of chicken feathers stick to him, who was paraded through the streets. This last example was certainly to be read as a crude attempt to produce spectacle and amused scandal, but the mocking and symbolic transformation of a bear into a hen was, paradoxically in its absurdity, an even more vivid exemplification of the exorcizing nature of the original custom.