Masquerade ball

[1] Masquerade balls were a feature of the Carnival season in the 15th century, and involved increasingly elaborate allegorical Royal Entries, pageants, and triumphal processions celebrating marriages and other dynastic events of late medieval court life.

Masquerade balls were extended into costumed public festivities in Italy during the 16th century Renaissance (Italian maschera).

With the fall of the Venetian Republic at the end of the 18th century, the use and tradition of masks gradually began to decline, until they disappeared altogether.

The same event was the basis of Giuseppe Verdi's opera A Masked Ball, although the censors in the original production forced him to portray it as a fictional story set in Boston.

A Swiss count who arrived in Italy in 1708, is credited with introducing to London the Venetian fashion of a semi-public masquerade ball, to which one might subscribe, with the first being held at Haymarket Opera House.

The anti-masquerade writers (among them such notables as Samuel Richardson) held that the events encouraged immorality and "foreign influence".

[4] In the 1770s, fashionable Londoners went to the masquerades organized by Teresa Cornelys at Carlisle House in Soho Square, and later to the Pantheon.

One of the most noted masquerade balls of the 20th century was that held at Palazzo Labia in Venice on 3 September 1951, hosted by Carlos de Beistegui.

Hosted by author Truman Capote, the ball was in honor of the Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham.

Masquerade masks had many uses including hiding one's identity, and using different colour to express one's freedom of speech and voice one's emotions and opinions without judgement.