The town of Ivrea, about 40 minutes north of Turin, holds one of Italy's more unusual carnival events - an orange-throwing battle. . The core celebration centers around the locally famous Battle of the Oranges. This involves some thousands of townspeople, divided into nine combat teams, who throw oranges at each other.
One of the citizens is elected Mugnaia. The legend has that a miller's daughter 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.
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 estimate of 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.
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