The Sunday Read: ‘Why Are These Italians Massacring Each Other With Oranges?’

Inside them were oranges. Oranges, the fruit. Over the next three days, 8,000 people in Ivrea would throw 900 tons of oranges at one another, one orange at a time, while tens of thousands of other people watched. They would throw the oranges very hard, very viciously, often while screaming profanities at their targets or yowling like Braveheart. And on that day in February, three years of constrained energy was due to explode all at once.