Homo festus: «man celebrating» as an image of active creativity in the context of Italian holiday tradition

The motley palette of holidays in Italian culture allows us to talk about the formation of the institution of festivities as a tradition of continuity, the transfer of knowledge and education, the disclosure of the creative component in a person. A huge number of cults in Ancient Rome and their Christian reinterpretation in the following centuries led to the formation of a carnival context in the broad sense of this concept, in which a person celebrating as the embodiment of active communication arises. This is not just a party having fun or rejoicing in a festive event, which would be a fixation of the external emotional state of a person, non mechanical activity is important in the holiday, including a creative component. This article briefly presents the historical background that influenced the formation of the festive worldview of Italians. The urban environment, and then the communes in Italy, formed role relationships within one community, in which life was molecular, that is, everyone depended on each other. The holiday of the Middle Ages involved all residents, a person of this era learned the world through communication with fellow villagers, participating in general theatrical productions. The Middle Ages are the culmination of the formation of a festive worldview: after several centuries of moral impoverishment, by the first millennium a person again discovers the world and his place in it; there is a division of events, a certain classification appears, urban sports holidays are highlighted; folk agrarian cults are being reinterpreted and, thanks to the power of episcopates in cities, they are already largely forming the national consciousness, and are not just ritual and ceremonial forms of appeasing the forces of nature. The image of a person celebrating, in which carelessness and practicality, unselfishness and prudence, simplicity and intricacy are manifested, is a component of the popular perception of the Italians as a nation as a whole.