The annual “Battaglia di Fiori” is a major event that for many years has been missing from the Ventimiglia summer scene, but the new town council headed by mayor Gaetano Scullino is keen to restore it.

This annual two-day event takes place every June. Thousands of people flock to the town to see flower covered floats parade through the streets, with music and dancing.

The Battle of the Flowers, with its long cultural traditions related to the world of agriculture, is dedicated to the awakening of nature and the end of Winter.

It takes between twenty and fifty people about three months to design, build and decorate each float, using about one hundred and twenty thousand flowers (mainly carnations) for each creation. The floats are all built outside the town and arrive in a long escorted procession:

The procession lasts well into the evening of the first day and is usually followed by a firework display on the beach.

On the second day, the Sunday, the carnival, which dates back to the mid 700’s, ends with a true battle with flowers, where hundreds of thousands of flowers are thrown from the floats at the onlooking crowds and in return thrown back at the floats. At the end of the day, the covered streets are a carpet of fragrant flowers.

This short video was made by The Riviera Woman for the 2010 Battaglia:

Source: Here is an approximate translation of a news feature published in Riviera 24 on November 18, 2009:

By now it is a certainty: after seven years the historic “Battle of flowers” returns to Ventimiglia: the main local event, the queen of the events of the border town.

This was announced by the city council, which in its 2020 forecast budget project planned to finance the important and historic event by allocating 150,000 euros. The budget will be approved by the city council in December, when all the municipal councilors will be able to express themselves in favor or not for the return of the event.

In the meantime, next week there will already be a first organizational meeting within the event office that intends to directly handle the administrative aspects, the publicity and the promotion of the event. Then the task of creating floats begins.