Overview
The Perth Italian Festival brought a full-scale celebration of Italian food and culture to Perth, drawing a crowd of over 20,000 people across a single day.
Elite returned for a second consecutive year as the festival’s lighting, trussing and rigging partner, engaged to deliver site-wide infrastructure alongside three standout features: a custom-built Trevi Fountain centrepiece, a distinctive all-black truss deployment for the festival’s Spritz Bar, and a fully functioning “Nonna’s House” installation, complete with working lamps, a working TV, and the obligatory plastic-covered furniture.
The Challenge
Delivering infrastructure at this scale, across a single unpredictable day, meant designing a system that could hold up to whatever the weather brought — while still looking the part for a crowd of 20,000.
Key considerations included:
- Extreme weather swings across the event, from 38-degree heat to heavy rain later the same day
- Site-wide rigging and trussing across multiple activation zones, including a custom-built Trevi Fountain
- A distinct all-black truss treatment for the Spritz Bar, designed to stand apart visually from the rest of the site
- Powering a fully functioning “Nonna’s House” installation — complete with working lamps and a working TV — as a standalone electrical build within the wider site infrastructure
- Reliable site-wide radio communications to keep every department connected across a large, high-traffic footprint
Any one of these alone would be manageable. Together, on the same day, they demanded a genuinely adaptable production plan.
Our Approach
Elite worked closely with the client from early planning to bring their vision for the festival’s signature features to life, while building in the flexibility to handle whatever the day threw at the site.
- Designed and built a custom Trevi Fountain installation as a festival centrepiece, combining rigging and lighting to make it a genuine drawcard for the event
- Delivered a bespoke all-black truss build for the Spritz Bar, giving it a distinct visual identity separate from the rest of the festival
- Built and wired a fully functioning “Nonna’s House” installation, complete with working lamps, a working TV, and classic plastic-covered furniture — an authentic, crowd-pleasing detail true to the festival’s theme
- Supplied and rigged lighting infrastructure across the entire festival site, covering multiple zones and activations
- Selected equipment and rigging methods suited to sustained outdoor exposure, protecting against both extreme heat and heavy rain on the day
- Rolled out site-wide radio communications, keeping every department in sync across a large event footprint
The Outcome
The festival delivered exactly the atmosphere it set out to create — a genuine celebration of Italian culture and food, with the Trevi Fountain, the Spritz Bar, and “Nonna’s House” among the standout visual moments of the day.
Audience numbers exceeded 20,000 people over the event, and the production held firm through both extremes of a Perth day in a single event window.
The result:
- A custom-built Trevi Fountain that became one of the festival’s signature features
- A distinct all-black truss identity for the Spritz Bar, setting it apart from the rest of the site
- A fully functioning “Nonna’s House,” complete with working lamps, TV and plastic-covered furniture, that became a nostalgic crowd favourite
- Site-wide lighting and rigging that performed reliably through 38-degree heat and heavy rain on the same day
- Seamless department coordination via site-wide radio communications
- A smooth, safe event for a crowd of more than 20,000 people
The project reinforced Elite’s ability to deliver bespoke creative builds alongside full-scale site infrastructure — even when the weather has other plans — and marked a second successful year building on an established relationship with the festival.
