All-Star Festival

In the middle of February the American league stops for a game that doesn't move the standings by an inch, and everyone watches it. They call it the All-Star Game. For one night the players who have been guarding each other since October end up on the same team.

All-Star Festival takes its name from there. Four days at the end of July when a town of twenty thousand rearranges its hours: during the day the tournaments take over the streets and squares, at night the stage hands them to the Italian rap scene. For four days the people playing and the people performing live in the same place.

Out in the provinces you learn a rule early on that nobody says out loud: the things that matter happen somewhere else, and sooner or later you have to go and reach them. We founded Playground partly to find out whether that was true. All-Star Festival is the longest answer we've managed to give: a small place making for itself what it used to leave for.

It lasts four days. For those four days the only thing I ask is that nobody feels like being anywhere else.