Festivals were politically complex events that achieved remarkable feats of artistic virtuosity and scenographic engineering on the early modern stage. Creating a sophisticated system of cultural codes and symbols, they became the most effective vehicle for the expression of imperial and civic ideology and self-fashioned cultural politics in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. While this genre has received great scholarly attention in the last decade—most prolifically in the field of art history—this thesis transgresses the traditional perception of the festival as a primarily visual genre. Instead, it presents an argument for the need to explore the temporal (musical), haptic and emotional phenomena that connect festivals not only to the history of the past, but to the present. It will show that the festival was a mobile practice that mapped pathways within the city and shaped the way that citizens interacted with the urban fabric. In understanding its cultural impact, one must look beyond the static visual artefact and begin to analyse how the festival constructed an (e)motional relationship with public and private space (and place) through musico-visual, experiential and performative interactions. Presenting the 1539 Florentine wedding festival of Duke Cosimo de’ Medici and Eleonora di Toledo as a case study, and contributing historically informed reconstructions of architectural and theatrical ephemera, this thesis shows how a cocultural theoretical analysis of festivals can enrich our understanding of the cultural politics of the early modern period, and can reveal the deeply entrenched philosophical motivations behind festivals and their unique performance programmes.