Culturele festivals

The festival calendar is where the season is most beautiful and least commercial: Glyndebourne from May to August, Salzburg and Bayreuth in July and August, Verbier, Gstaad and Lucerne in the Alpine summer, Edinburgh through August, Ravello above the Amalfi Coast, the Palio's two runnings in Siena, Venice's Carnival before Lent and its Redentore fireworks in July, Courchevel's fireworks in the ski season. Tickets go on sale months ahead and the best sell out; the civic traditions are free. What separates this category from the rest of the calendar is that the work is the point. A festival's programme is published months in advance and the performances, not the intervals, are what people travel for. The economics follow: Salzburg and Bayreuth sell by ballot and subscription, Edinburgh's Fringe sells thousands of tickets a day at short notice, and the civic festivals in Siena, Venice and Courchevel are watched from a street or a quay by anyone who turns up. The season's densest festival weeks are the last of July and the whole of August, when the cities empty and the mountains and the smaller Italian towns fill.