As is the case for more than two centuries, this year in Genzano (RM) Traditional Flower Festival is held. From 13 to 15 June, an immense floral carpet will stretch, divided into various paintings, for about 2000 square meters on the central Via Italo Belardi (formerly Via Livia).
For the making of paintings, painted on the pavement, we need, in addition to plants, at least 350,000 flowers; the individual petals are used by flower arrangers, as well as the colors of a palette by painters: the yellow of the broom, the torrena blue, red carnations, the green of boxwood and fennel.
The event is divided into various phases: design and preparation of sketches, collection of flowers and plants, the "spelluccamento" (separation of the petals from the corolla and their preservation in the caves of the municipality), the drawings on the ground (on Saturday night), the laying of the petals (Sunday morning), the floral display completed (Sunday afternoon), the Corpus Christi procession (Sunday evenings) and finally the "shoulder" (when the children running from the steps of the Church of Santa Maria dìsfano flowered frameworks).

Historically the floral display is a party closely linked to the Christian celebration of Corpus Christi and its origins date back to the 13th century, when during the procession of the Blessed Sacrament "spilling helter-skelter flowers abundantly."
On 29 June 1625, then, in Rome, in the Vatican Basilica, on the initiative of Benedict Drei, Chief of the Apostolic Floreria, to give more prestige to the Feast of St Peter and St Paul, began the tradition of decorating the Church with flowers arranged in mosaic, this custom that spread in many Catholic countries.
The Flower Festival in Genzano is distinguished, however, from other large Flower Festival for both of his paintings is its suggestive scenographic context of seventeenth-century Via i. Belardi (formerly Via Livia).
The origin of the Flower Festival in Genzano, just as today we know it, is quite uncertain.
Some researchers recognize in 1778 the official year of beginning in our city of the event.
An anonymous manuscript of 1824, instead, titled "history of the origin of the Flower Festival", preserved in the Biblioteca Nazionale in Rome, indicates in 1782 the year in which it was made, on the occasion of the octave of the feast of Corpus Christi, Via Sforza the first Flower Festival – extended meaning out of an entire street – on the initiative of the brothers Arcangelo and Nicola Leofreddi. Don Arcangelo Lala got from the Bishop of Albano that at least one of the three processions passed to Via Sforza, and when in 1782 passed for the first time on this road the Blessed Sacrament, he invited all the inhabitants of the street to create carpets of flowers but not, as was the custom until then, small in size and in front of the houses, but all together in the middle of the road.
That year marks so the birth of the "real" Infiorata: brightly colored flower carpet representing religious pictures alternated with decorative motifs.
From a collection of scattered petals in bulk thus becomes carpet of flowers arranged in such a way as to outline a real work of art, in which each petal tells a story.
The flower festival took place in Via Sforza only until the end of the 1930s. In 1836 the monumental fountain of Saint Sebastian, by Virginio Bracci, built around 1776, was moved from the center of the bus at the entrance of Via Sforza, where it is today.
The inhabitants of this pathway, not tolerating it, would not attend the event, which was achieved only by the inhabitants of Via Livia (today's Via Italo Belardi) that already at the beginning of the last century imitated the townsmen to Via Sforza.
From the end of 800 l'infiorata had a substantial transformation: the realization of floral carpets was no longer entrusted solely to the inhabitants of this single away, but to the entire community.
Throughout its history the Flower Festival in Genzano has been visited by many famous people who, fascinated by such a spectacle, they left evidence in some of their works: H.C. Andersen, n. Gogol, Antonio Colarieti, Massimo d'Azeglio, August Bournonville. Garibaldi, during a special flower festival created in his honor in 1875 genzanesi, invited by the authorities to pass on the carpet of flowers, refused, saying: "certain things divine do not trample".
Over the centuries our floral display from popular local event has become an international event of art, culture and especially of faith — is made in honor of the feast of Corpus Christi and is a tribute to "the one who goes" – which attracts thousands of visitors from Italy and abroad.

During the whole period of the Infiorata (from 13 to 15 June) you can visit the Park and the Palazzo Sforza Cesarini which will host this year the exhibition by the artist Vincenzo Balsamo.