The Battle of the Oranges: Ivrea and the Carnival That Throws 500 Tonnes of Fruit

Tue, 13 Feb 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Every February a small town in Piedmont, at the mouth of the Aosta valley, spends three days pelting itself with citrus until the cobbles run with pulp and the whole place smells like a marmalade factory that has caught fire. This is Ivrea, an hour north of Turin, and the event is the Battaglia delle Arance — the Battle of the Oranges, the centrepiece of the Storico Carnevale di Ivrea. It is one of the oldest and by some distance the most violent-looking carnivals in Europe, and I have never been. I want to say that plainly, because the honest version of this piece is a correspondent’s read from the record, not a war story I have earned. What follows is the town’s own history, the mechanics of the fight, and why a place would agree, year after year, to bruise itself for a legend.

Ivrea on vo.rs

The Battle of the Oranges: Ivrea and the Carnival That Throws 500 Tonnes of Fruit