People in this part of Italy celebrate their Medievalness with a vengence. And in June, they find many excuses to dress in colourful costumes that you could quite imagine Romeo bumping into Juliet.

One of the festivals in June is the Archidado Joust in Cortona on the first Sunday of each June. It commenced in 1397 to celebrate the wedding of Francesco Casali, the Lord of Cortona, and Antonia Salimbeni, a noble woman from Siena. It starts with a crossbow competition. We missed this, although there was a small area at the edge of the square during Medieval Market Day, where you could practice being William Tell.

What we did not miss and which has been a real highlight of our stay here was the synchronised  flag tossing contest, hosted in Cortona wth invited teams from the city of Arrezo and the town of Subbiano. There with some cute displays by children called sbandieratori, all dressed in mediaeval costume and everything was accompanied by drummers (tamburi) and trumpeters (trombettieri).

The procession starts with the arrival of the worthies from the city and towns, who are then seated at the edge of the performance area followed by the drummers and trumpeters, now playing, and finally performers from the teams, who then stand at the edges of the town centre. For the next few hours we witnessed a very colourful and atmospheric pageant as each team in turn performed intricate routines.

It was hard to take good pictures at night, when the subjects were in motion, but I think that the videos taken with mobile phone are not bad and, while there are several, each one is very special, apart perhaps the, shakey hands, bad positioning and  'fade out' or lack of at the end of each clip.