The Marketing committee has been very busy and preparations are well under way for Italian Festival. We are very excited that we have booked SWRL Soccer Jugglers to perform on Saturday the 15th. They will be hosting a clinic for kids, and performing on the street and interacting with our visitors. To get an idea of their show view this video:
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We are also pleased to let you know that we have hired
Brenda Dunn to provide a living colouring book, ten feet long by 5 feet high that visitors can colour in. Brenda will be on the street Saturday and Sunday.
On Sunday,
Yogatown will host an outdoor Yoga class in the soccer field that will be family-friendly and encourage Dad's to participate for Father's day.
We have booked Stilt Walkers, the Firemen's Band, Face painters, Balloon artists, Pop-up hip hop dancers and Pop-up modern dancers to animate the street. The kids from St. Anthony's soccer club will be handing out Italian themed tattoos to visitors.
From our own merchants, we will feature dance displays by Arthur Murray, Virtual Reality tours by
Colony VR and Matt Cassidy of the Christmas shows at the Gladstone will be back as a huge clown.
Vasto will be providing their very successful children's fashion show again this year.
The Ferrari Festival will be back featuring the Show n Shine of Ferrari cars along Preston Street Friday and Saturday night, and the Ferrari Demo Zone on Carling at 3:00 on Saturday.
The Italian Car Parade is queued up and ready to present over 120 cars! As well, the
Italian Car Club of Ottawa will be providing their Retro Italian Car and Motorcycle Museum at the Scotiabank Parking Lot.
and will be running from Gladstone to Preston to Anderson to Rochester and back to Gladstone for a downhill run back to Preston Street. The competitors are very excited about the new route because the hills create up and downhill challenges! Should be an exciting race! The Bike races will run from 9:00 am to 2:00 pm (roads closed between 7am and 3pm).
The Street Party is ready to roll! Hopefully all of the restaurants have applied for their liquor license extensions by now, because the deadline is almost on us!
The Board of the BIA has a policy that was developed to be fair to all our merchants, to not allow outside vendors to come into the festival and compete with our businesses. For this reason, we do not allow food vendors and require that only licensed businesses would be allowed to sell alcohol during Italian Festival.
There are many reasons
this decision was made:
Selling alcohol is the core business of our restaurants, they have invested in training, their wine cellars and inventories and we do not think it would be fair to allow outside competitors. Also, existing licensed restaurants will be more responsible in their service of alcohol because their liquor licenses can be taken away if they overserve or serve minors. Their servers have all taken the provincially mandated Safe Serve training. The restaurants are fully insured for liquor sales.