The story
Infiorata di Genzano in Genzano di Roma
Dating to 1778 and tied to the feast of Corpus Domini, Genzano di Roma's Infiorata covers roughly two thousand square meters of its main street with around fifteen flower-petal panels using close to half a million blooms. The tradition traces back to Vatican petal mosaics from the 1620s. On the Monday after, children traditionally run through and destroy the finished carpet in a ritual called the Scoppio.
Genzano di Roma's Infiorata dates to 1778, when residents first laid a continuous carpet of colored flower petals along the town's main street for the feast of Corpus Domini, adapting a technique that Vatican florist Benedetto Drei had used inside St Peter's Basilica as early as 1625 and that the architect Gian Lorenzo Bernini later helped popularize across the Castelli Romani towns south of Rome.