The Ferrara Buskers Festival is a non competitive parade of the best street musicians in the world. In terms of tradition and dimension it is the most important festival of this kind. Every year the organization invites at its expense 20 groups, but beside them many others join the festival.
The result is fantastic: during the week of the festival Ferrara is transformed into a music town, a city to play, which at any corner unveals new atmospheres, between old and new tunes, to the discovery of familiar or unknown sonorities.
And so everybody by bike or on foot is ready to follow, in the wide spaces surrounding the Este Castle and the beautiful Cathedral, the involving rhythms of the African drums, the cheerful atmospheres of a dixie band or the crazy gags of some English groups; advancing forward the narrow medieval streets you can be guided by the sound of a Celtic arp, or sit down on the pavement to appreciate the emotionful notes of an Argentine tango, or follow, as the little mice of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, the distant echo of a flute.
Any kind of music at the Ferrara Buskers Festival has the right of citizenship, and there are also some "virtuosos" playing the most original instruments: saws, washboards, cowbells, teachests, cristal glasses have made the audience discover unexpected melodious potentialities.
The buskers' music becomes in this way the soundtrack of an ideal journey through the thousand world-wide cultures and the occasion to many people to discover a beautiful town that was able in the past centuries to fascinate the travellers with its silence and now it can win them over with the polychromy of notes, faces and clothes.