Fairgrounds and Luna Parks are activities carried out by professional groups that, with varied expressions and of general character, are called Travellers or Travelling Showmen, Lunapark dealers , artists, however tradesmen of travelling fairs. Actually they are groups of families that travel all over Italy square's fairs and compose a cultural sum very heterogeneous, composed of family tradition's travellers, native of single places distributed all over the peninsula: Alpic arc areas, the plain of the Po (specially Piedmont, Lombardy, Emilia-Romagna, Veneto); Apennine piacentino-parmigiano; Abruzzi mountains; the Ciociara related to the roman situation.

Travelling Showmen should not be confused with homeless gipsies, as they represent an ethnic group apart so they have an own origin and a different culture. The travellers instead, get their origin by non-migratory cultures of sedentary people of the above mentioned areas, where they came away, in particularly difficult economic situations, above all in historical periods of the agricultural crisis, beginning from the Middle Age to the 1950s. The economic deprivation and the impossibility to fiund the support inside own origin's place, were certainly the main causes of the choice to enter into a square's career.

So were born the big traveller's families of far tradition and also those that are recently entered into the travel, as the travelling showmen from Bergantino, that beginning from the 1920s, period of the critical economic depression of the post-war period, they could enter, little by little with incredible sacrifices, into the chain of travelling show, pursuing a redemption dream from an unacceptable condition of life.

Now the social and economic texture of the place is characterized, besides the entrepreneurial activity of rides manufacture , of another peculiarity that makes special the community of Bergantino: the existence of fifty travelling families (in the past they were the double) who from March to November are seasonal showmen, going around with their own amusement rides all over Italy. The world of the travellers is full of anthropological interest, of all periods, a world from ever neglected by the official culture because it was considered wrongly minor history.

Visita il museo della giostra  | Bergantino and the dreams' industry | From the Fairground to the Luna Park