John Last

History Correspondent

Every year in mid-November, the small northern town of Mirano, Italy, goes absolutely goose crazy. Stuffed geese start popping up in every storefront. Goose sausage goes on sale. Soon, posters paper the town, calling people to a street fair of many spectacles—and to something called the Zogo dell’Oca, the “goose game” of Mirano.

On the weekend when Catholics celebrate St. Martin’s Day, the beginning of the “reveling season” of winter, Mirano’s central square is completely transformed into a giant, 16th-century board game. Visitors pour in from all over the region to cheer on teams of young players in striped jerseys as they compete in a series of bizarre and outlandish challenges. All are, inexplicably, dressed in 19th-century clothing, from the children crowding the entry gate to the old men who act as referees.

team competing at Zogo dell’Oca
Visitors pour in from all over the region to cheer on teams of young players in striped jerseys as they compete in a series of bizarre and outlandish challenges. John Last

It’s something so bizarre it could be one of the surreal dream sequences of Italian director Federico Fellini. But the Zogo dell’Oca is very real—and despite all appearances, it is an event of relatively recent invention.

Amid surging lines of patrons awaiting goose ravioli and risotto at this year’s event, I find Roberto Gallorini, the head of the Pro Loco Mirano, a volunteer association for the promotion of Mirano and its businesses. For the previous three weeks, he’s been flitting to and fro in preparation for this year’s edition. “In the last two days, you don't even have time to sleep,” he tells me. He went to bed at 3:30 a.m. last night and woke up at 7 a.m. “All the most important things, you have to do at the last minute.”

Robert Gallorini
Roberto Gallorini, the head of the Pro Loco Mirano, a volunteer association for the promotion of Mirano and its businesses, is the brain behind Mirano’s Zogo dell’Oca. John Last

Gallorini, cutting a fine figure in a black velvet cape and boater hat, is the brain behind Mirano’s Zogo dell’Oca. He and a small group of friends dreamed up the idea for this festival in the 1990s—but it didn’t come from nowhere. “This celebration itself did not exist,” he says. “But there was always St. Martin’s Day.”

The goose game’s connections to St. Martin

Today, St. Martin of Tours is one of the most beloved saints in the Catholic Church, particularly in Europe, and yet he falls into a broad category of somewhat reluctant saints. He’s famous for hiding among a flock of geese when the people of Tours tried to make him a bishop—it was only the birds’ honking that gave him away.

goose-shaped agnolotti
A woman holds up an agnolotti shaped like a goose. John Last

Thus, for centuries, St. Martin has been associated with geese, with his saint’s day celebrated at the end of the agricultural year, when geese fattened over the rich harvest months of autumn are finally slaughtered and cooked into delicious feast-day meals.

In Mirano, geese historically had an extra special significance. The town is just a short drive inland from Venice, in the countryside where many of the city’s wealthy families kept their summer homes and villas. And for much of its history, Gallorini explained, the diverse region had been home to a large number of Jewish and Muslim families. While Italy’s Catholics were content to feast on pork prosciutto, sausages and salami through the winter, Jews and Muslims raised geese for the same purpose—so much so that the goose became inextricably linked to Italy’s Jewish cuisine. In fact, one count from 1830 identified 1,580 geese in Venice’s Jewish ghetto alone, “practically one goose for every Jew residing in the city at the time,” the historian Donatella Calabi writes.

goose sausages and salami
Vendors sell goose sausages and salami. John Last

Today, goose sausage is known among Italians as “the ecumenical salami,” Gallorini says, as it is the only type “that all three monotheistic religions can eat.” And, since 2015, it has formed a central part of an annual feast held together with the chief rabbi and imam of Venice, part of the Zogo dell’Oca celebrations.

But there’s another reason St. Martin’s Day was a particularly rowdy time for Venetians. Coming at the end of the farming calendar, the day marked the end of most sharecroppers’ contracts, when they would find out if they were renewed for another year. It was the day when peasant farmers were separated into haves and have-nots. In Venetian dialect, Gallorini explains, far San Martin (to make like St. Martin) still means to make a move, like those who would have to go wandering in search of new work. Among his friends, it gave birth to a saying: Chi no mangia oca a San Martin no fa el beco de un quatrin, meaning “whoever doesn’t eat goose on St. Martin’s Day won’t make a penny.”

Everywhere you turn during the Zogo dell’Oca, the smell, the taste or the orange-beaked face of a goose will greet you. The goose is “the undisputed queen of the fair,” according to the event’s website. “Everything, for these two days in November, will refer to her, present in every effigy and dimension, in all corners of the festival.”

goose wares
The goose is “the undisputed queen of the fair,” according to the event’s website. John Last

The rules of the goose game

But what of the “goose game” that awaits us in the piazza? Behind a stall selling goose salami, the smell of mulled wine wafting over us, I find Mirco Cotugno and Matteo Marin, two players helping a fellow teammate wrap himself in a broad, yellow scarf. They explain their colors mean they’re representing the nearby village of Campocroce, one of the six teams of eight players who will compete in the goose game later that afternoon.

“This costume is my father-in-law’s,” Marin tells me, pointing to his blue-and-white striped shirt. It’s Marin’s third year competing. “Now I’m the one who walks around like I know stuff,” he says. But at the start, “you worry you’ll get it wrong, make a mistake.”

“Sometimes, the rules are complicated,” Cotugno adds. “Last year was a bit … iffy. It was my first time.”

acrobat on pole
Acrobats shuffle themselves up a 50-foot pole to grab bags with playing orders suspended high above the square. John Last

The goose game, I quickly learn, is not for the faint of heart. It begins with selecting what order the teams will play in. This is done by acrobats, who shuffle themselves up a 50-foot pole to grab bags with playing orders suspended high above the square.

When the game begins, a team begins their turn by rolling a pair of giant foam dice and advancing a massive game piece up the enormous, piazza-sized board. Every ten spaces or so is one that calls for a skill-testing competition between two teams—tug-of-war, a sack race, racing on stilts or targeting giant wooden geese by slingshot. One particularly diabolical contest is called i zoccoli—the clogs—wherein the feet of five team members are tied together while they race around the piazza, fending off shoves and insults from their passing competitors. The loser is sent back to the space they started from. “There is a rivalry,” Marin explains. “But it’s really a friendly game.” At the end of 90 minutes, the farthest piece toward the end is the winner, taking home money for a local charity—and bragging rights for the next year, at least.

racing in clogs
One particularly diabolical contest is called i zoccoli—the clogs—wherein the feet of five team members are tied together while they race around the piazza. John Last
gourd carrying competition
Every ten spaces or so is one that calls for a skill-testing competition between two teams. John Last

The goose game has its origins in a 16th-century board game once played at the court of the Medici and famously gifted to Spain’s King Philip II. One of the world’s first “race games,” according to board game historian Adrian Seville, it plays out much like a game of snakes and ladders. Spaces represent the steps in catching, slaughtering and preparing a goose for the festive table, and pitfalls—like a jail, a tavern or death—could lose a player a turn or two, or return them to the start. Its 63 squares supposedly represent nine seven-year periods in a person’s life—a nod to the esoteric philosophy of Marsilio Ficino, a philosopher and Catholic priest of the early Italian Renaissance who believed that people experienced some change in their body or mind, or both, every seven years.

The version played here, though, has a much more modern spin. In the 1970s, a local entrepreneur and his painter friend decided to produce their own version of the game defined by local landmarks, the event’s website explains. The game board features the local school, the water mill, the gelato cart—and a space devoted to Lucifer, who looms over worshippers on the painted ceiling of the town’s central church. Gallorini’s St. Martin’s Day motto even makes an appearance, on space 59.

goose game board
The goose game's 63 squares supposedly represent nine seven-year periods in a person’s life. John Last

A community celebration and tourist attraction

For Gallorini, the purpose of the goose game is really to bring the town and its many outlying hamlets together for a single weekend of festivities. It’s something he says was well understood as a necessity at the turn of the century. “There were only three shops in the town then,” he says. “But during a fair, all the others came from the mountains, from the area around, and they all brought things to share, to sell.”

Elsewhere in Italy, similar customs have become a cornerstone of the local economy. Gallorini is actually from Tuscany, where festivals like Siena’s iconic horse race, Florence’s explosive Easter cart and Arezzo’s Saracen joust have been fixtures on the calendar—and major tourist attractions—for centuries.

“In all of Tuscany, Umbria, Marche, there are medieval festivals—and they are fantastic,” Gallorini says. But when it came time to design his own local version, Gallorini felt that imitating those festivals’ antiquity would be “fake.” “If only the costumes are historical, you are being false,” he says. “We’re not talking about 300 years of history here.”

man competes on stilts
Spectators watch a man compete on stilts. John Last

So Gallorini had a brilliant idea: to mimic the aesthetic of a turn-of-the-century circus. “The beginning of the 20th century is close, in the sense that we all have photos of our grandparents,” he says. “At the same time, it’s far away—it’s historical. You can see photos of a taxi here in Mirano from that time, and it’s a cart pulled by horses.”

Thus, the tradition was born. In Vetrego, one of Mirano’s frazioni or suburbs, a group of seamstresses produces high-quality reproductions of turn-of-the-century dresses and suits that sell like hotcakes. They offer photo shoots to visitors to benefit charities in the town. Aurora Scattolin, a dressmaker I meet at the photo booth, has been coming to Zogo dell’Oca for her entire life. “I am 27 years old, and I’m one of the first children, 20 years ago, to be dressed up at this stand,” she tells me. “I’ve grown up doing this.”

With its recent pedigree, Mirano’s festival may seem somehow less authentic than the medieval festivals you might find elsewhere. But the reality is that so many of Italy’s iconic festivals are still relatively young.

man competes at rolling a ring
The purpose of the goose game is really to bring the town and its many outlying hamlets together for a single weekend of festivities. John Last

In Alba, a highlight of the town’s world-famous annual truffle festival is the palio degli asini, a shambolic donkey race. It traces its origins to a rivalry with a neighboring town in the 13th century—but, in reality, it got its start in the 1970s. So many of Italy’s traditional food festivals began not long after, when the emergence of culinary tourism and growing appreciation for local food traditions gave rise to new annual celebrations. “In the past decade, [food festivals] have reached a surprising prominence in the Italian foodscape,” the anthropologist Michele Filippo Fontefrancesco wrote in 2020. “The ‘exportation of the dolce vita,’ the Italian lifestyle and foodways, [now] appears to be one of the most promising directions for the national tourism industry.”

For Gallorini, the fact that the people of Mirano support the Zogo dell’Oca year after year and participate with such gusto is a reflection of Italians’ “sense of art.” “It was the same sense in the Renaissance—to live, to stay with beautiful things that fill your heart,” he adds. He likens putting on a festival to setting a table. “Even if we’re having a sandwich, we’ll put a tablecloth down,” he says. “It’s even better if you can put some flowers, some cutlery, all these other things.”

A community is not given, Gallorini tells me, but it is made through hard work. “It is a group of people who help each other,” he says. When he retires, he’s still not sure who his successor will be in orchestrating the annual festival. But he is confident of one thing—the Zogo dell’Oca will certainly live on.

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John Last

John Last is a freelance journalist and producer based in northern Italy. He writes on history, religion, and politics from locations around the globe. Follow him on Twitter @johnwlast.