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The Battle of the Oranges is a carnival and festival in the Northern Italian city of Ivrea, which includes a tradition of throwing of oranges between organized groups. The carnival may have started in the 12th century and it is the largest food fight in Italy.  

The core celebration is based on a locally famous Battle of the Oranges that involves some thousands of townspeople, divided into nine combat teams, who throw oranges at each other – with considerable violence – during the traditional carnival days: Sunday, Monday and Tuesday. The carnival takes place in February: it ends on the night of "Fat Tuesday" with a solemn funeral. Traditionally, at the end of the silent march that closes the carnival the "General" says goodbye to everyone with the classical phrase in dialect "arvedse a giobia a ‘n bot", translated as "we'll see each other on Thursday at one", referring to the Thursday the carnival will start the next year. 

One of the citizens is elected Mugnaia. The legend has that a miller's daughter (a "Mugnaia") once refused to accept the "right" of the local duke to spend a night with each newly wed woman and chopped his head off. Today the carriages represent the duke's guard and the orange throwers the revolutionaries. Spectators are not allowed to throw oranges, but visitors are allowed to enlist in the teams. If they wear a red hat they are considered part of the revolutionaries and will not have oranges thrown at them. 

Originally beans were thrown, then apples. Later, in the 19th century, oranges came to represent the duke's chopped off head. The origin of the tradition to throw oranges is not well understood, particularly as oranges do not grow in the foothills of the Italian Alps and must be imported from Sicily. In 1994 an estimated 265,000 kilograms (580,000 lb) of oranges were brought to the city, mainly coming from the leftovers of the winter crop in southern Italy.

For more information, please visit Ivrea Carnival and the Battle of the Oranges website.

Retrieved and modified from Wikipedia on May 31, 2010. Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this text only under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License and the GNU Free Documentation License.