Sicily

One street, laid in a single night

A hundred and twenty-two metres of sloping baroque street in Noto, covered end to end in flower petals in sixteen panels. It is worth the drive, and it is not what the guidebooks imply it is.

Where: Noto, via Corrado Nicolaci
When: The third Sunday of May, and the long weekend around it
Getting in: Ticketed — buy ahead

The third Sunday of May

The rule has not changed since the first one: the third Sunday of May, and the long weekend around it. The design goes onto the paving in chalk during the preceding week, the petals are laid overnight on the Friday, and the street is open from the Saturday morning.

How long it stays open has moved about — a Tuesday closing was added at one point for school groups — so the safe plan is the weekend itself. Noto is about ninety kilometres from Catania, and on that weekend the historic centre is closed to traffic, which is worth building into the morning.

One street, and why this one

Via Corrado Nicolaci is a hundred and twenty-two metres long and about seven wide, and it climbs. On one side are the balconies of Palazzo Nicolaci di Villadorata, carried on corbels cut into horses, lions, griffins and grotesque heads. At the top, closing the view, is the church of Montevergini, with its two bell towers and its concave front.

That is the whole argument. The street is already a single composition before a petal goes down — a framed, rising, decorated corridor with a building deliberately placed at the end of it. Dozens of Sicilian towns lay flower carpets. This one had the best stage.

A sloping street seen from its lower end, filled from wall to wall with panels of coloured flower petals laid on the paving — pinks, reds, greens and cream, framed in strips of green. Spectators line both sides behind red rope barriers; carved stone balconies overhang from the left and a domed church closes the view at the top of the slope. — Looking up the slope. The church at the top is the reason the composition works from either end.Ввласенко · CC BY 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons

Chalk first, petals after

The carpet is laid in sixteen panels, and that number has held across edition after edition. During the week before, the designs are drawn straight onto the paving with chalk, brushes, sponges and thin wooden battens, so that by the Friday the street is a full-size outline drawing waiting to be coloured in.

Then it is filled overnight. More than two hundred infioratori work through the Friday night, kneeling on the stones, dropping petals out of crates by hand. Torba — peat — does the dark tones that no flower gives cleanly, and small quantities of wild plants are still cut from the countryside around the town.

The same street at night, lit by street lamps, with a church glowing gold at the top of the slope. Dozens of people in blue team shirts kneel on the paving laying handfuls of petals, with wooden crates, trays and black buckets around them. Onlookers stand in rows along both walls behind barriers. — The Friday night. This is the part almost nobody photographs, and the part worth staying up for.Davide Mauro · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons

Looking straight down onto a narrow street from a bell tower: a long strip of bright flower-petal panels running between two rows of tiled rooftops and terraces, edged with a deep red border, with small figures walking the margins and washing lines and plant pots on the balconies to either side. — From the bell tower. Sixteen panels between the roofs, and the whole thing goes in one night.Effems · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons

It arrived in 1980

There is a real inversion in it, and it is more interesting than the age it is usually given. Genzano's flower carpet is religious — it is laid for Corpus Domini, and the procession walks over it. Noto's greets the spring and is attached to nothing. The daughter is secular and the mother is not.

It has run every year since, with one break. There was no carpet in 2020.

Before you go

Entry to the street is ticketed and has been for years, which surprises people who have read that it is a free street festival. Buy ahead; the price moves.

The subject changes every year and is picked by competition, so there is no point learning what it shows before you arrive. There is a children's version laid on a neighbouring street the weekend before, and a costumed parade through the town on the Sunday.

And go early, or go on the Friday night. By Sunday afternoon the petals have been in the sun for two days, several thousand people have walked the edges, and the thing you came to see is at its worst.