Monte Isola: the ancient tradition of the ‘Holy Cross’

During the second week of September, the five-yearly festival ‘Festa di Santa Croce’ (Holy Cross) or popularly known as ‘Festa dei fiori’ (Flower Festival) makes Monte Isola Island in Lake Iseo, a more attractive tourist destination for thousands of italian and international visitors.  

The so-called ‘Flower Festival’ represents a unique event in a peaceful island which is particularly devoted to sustainable tourism and traditional island activities. Indeed, Carzano and Novale’s streets are decorated with about 300.000 paper flowers, placed on typical arched fences.

Local women have been working on these creative activities since the previous edition! It really takes long time to prepare everything, because families then compete with each other for the most beautiful flower composition ever!

Paper flowers should be as much as similar to real ones as per tradition but, as women say, some of them are really beyond imagination, with bright colours and odd sizes!

…Even houses, courtyards, and hidden streets have been decorated with thousands of paper flowers, so finely crafted they look real! You can find roses, wisteria twigs, orchids, carnations, bellflowers, irises, lilies, daffodils and many others more.

Everything is also ready for evening entertainment: the floral decorations are interspersed with lights, creating a captivating atmosphere, blending history, popular-religious tradition and modernity.

The Festival commemorates the defeat of the first cholera epidemic that decimated Monte Isola’s population in 1836, praying for the protection of the Holy Cross, when the epidemic miraculously disappeared.

You can also attend religious celebrations and events such as: live concerts, dialect comedies, dances and popular songs, culminating with the traditional ‘naecc’ fishing boat race and a fabulous firework display! An old-fashioned festival nowadays!