The tradition of the flower floats of San Remo goes back to the dawn of modern floriculture, between 1800 and 1900.
The first edition that we have memory is the ” Festa della Dea Flora” (The Feast of the Goddess Flora) of 1903, where the novelites of the San Remo floreculture adorned an elegant parade of flowered carriages in the heart of San Remo during the Belle Epoque period.
The parade of the flowered floats of San Remo and nearby towns was interrupted by the First World War, to rebegin in 1921 and once again been interrupted in 1925 for a series of frigid winters that drastically devastated the floral production of the area.
In the thirties appeared the first real allergorical floats that paraded long Via Vittorio, today Via Matteotti, between two wings of crowds spaced out by folk groups, that threw flowers among the crowd. This was the model of the ” Battaglia dei Fiori ” (Battle of Flowers) that still represents an important tradition for Ventimiglia in the month of June and for Nice during the Carnival of February.
After the interruption for the Second World War , it was between the fifties and sixties that the event reached its peak becoming famous thanks to the TV broadcasting in Eurovision, that brought the beauty of the San Remo climate in the cold and snowy cities of Northern Europe. This was the period of Europe in Bloom, with the flowered floats entitled with the names of the European countries, accompagnied by celebrities and the Misses of the European countries. Still today the international notoriety of the event is due to that groundbreaking period of the European television.
In those years thanks to the creativity of Rino Ceriolo, the parade made a huge breakthrough with admirable elegance and improved technical skill. On the website of the photographer Max Mencarelli you can see some old photos of those years.
Then from 1967 the event was forgotten until 1980.