The Italian Town That Becomes a Giant, Goose-Themed Board Game Each Fall

Every year in mid-November, the small northern town of Mirano, Italy, goes absolutely goose crazy. Stuffed geese start popping up in every storefront. Goose sausage goes on sale. Soon, posters paper the town, calling people to a street fair of many spectacles—and to something called the Zogo dell’Oca, the “goose game” of Mirano.

On the weekend when Catholics celebrate St. Martin’s Day, the beginning of the “reveling season” of winter, Mirano’s central square is completely transformed into a giant, 16th-century board game. Visitors pour in from all over the region to cheer on teams of young players in striped jerseys as they compete in a series of bizarre and outlandish challenges. All are, inexplicably, dressed in 19th-century clothing, from the children crowding the entry gate to the old men who act as referees.

It’s something so bizarre it could be one of the surreal dream sequences of Italian director Federico Fellini. But the Zogo dell’Oca is very real—and despite all appearances, it is an event of relatively recent invention.

Amid surging lines of patrons awaiting goose ravioli and risotto at this year’s event, I find Roberto Gallorini, the head of the Pro Loco Mirano, a volunteer association for the promotion of Mirano and its businesses. For the previous three weeks, he’s been flitting to and fro in preparation for this year’s edition. “In the last two days, you don’t even have time to sleep,” he tells me. He went to bed at 3:30 a.m. last night and woke up at 7 a.m. “All the most important things, you have to do at the last minute.”

Gallorini, cutting a fine figure in a black velvet cape and boater hat, is the brain behind Mirano’s Zogo dell’Oca. He and a…