Confetti are traditionally almonds from Avola, a town in Sicily’s province of Syracuse, encased in a hard bite-size outer shell of sugar. They’re ubiquitous at all Italian celebrations, most frequent in the spring and summer, but of course not exclusively, because they’re a symbol of good fortune and prosperity. At baptisms their sugar coating is obviously pink or blue; at first communions, confirmations, and weddings white; at university graduations red; and at wedding anniversaries: yellow for the 20th, silver for the 25th, aquamarine for the 30th, green for the 40th, gold for the 50th, and white again for the 60th.
When I first moved to Italy during the 1970s, there were numerous stores everywhere that sold confetti and their bomboniere or wedding favors. The name for these fancy confetti containers derives from the French word for candy or bon bon. These “boxes” were originally (in 18th-century France) made of silver, crystal, and porcelain, but in the 1970s predominantly of porcelain. Once filled with the confetti of the appropriate color, the store elegantly packaged them with a slim card-reminder of the occasion’s date and the celebrant’s name or names.
Today there are few such stores left probably because fewer Italians are getting married or marrying at a later age, and subsequently having fewer children if any. Moreover, today’s bomboniere are more practical needing less fancy wrappings: picture frames, key-chains, salt-and-pepper shakers, paperweights, memo-clips and bottle openers, for examples. Not to mention that pistachios, hazel nuts, dried fruits, and chocolate can replace the almond as the filling. When not given as party favors or eaten as candies, confetti are often used to decorate cakes.
Confetti are presented in several ways:
Customarily, wedding gifts, especially from close relatives and intimate friends, are presented in person so the future couple’s families display on their coffee table a silver or crystal bowl filled with confetti plus a silver serving spoon. On that occasion, after sampling the confetti, these V.I.P. guests receive their bomboniera. Since they’re expensive, bomboniere are given to a special few.
On the wedding day, confetti in little voile bow-tied bags, known as sacchetti, or in little boxes are often used as place cards. In addition, at the end of the wedding meal the bride and groom customarily go from table to table and distribute them to their guests. The groom carries a silver bowl full of loose confetti which the bride serves to guests from a large silver spoon.
In each sacchetto there are always an odd number of confetti, thus an undividable number to symbolize an undividable union. Three represents the Holy Trinity; five: health, wealth, happiness, long life, and fertility; and seven because God made the world in seven days and there are seven sacraments.
Confetti were first mentioned by the Fazi family (447BC) and by the ancient Roman gourmet Apicius (14-37 AD). They were honey-coated almonds. Another theory is that they originated around 1200 AD in the Middle East and Turkey and were imported to Italy by either Genovese or Venetian merchants.
Until the Renaissance, they, and other sweets, continued to be made with honey. In the 14th century the poet Boccaccio (1313-75) mentioned them as did Folgore di San Gimignano. Later writers who praised confetti were Goethe who gave his future wife a jewellery box filled with confetti, Manzoni, Carducci, Verga, Pascoli and D’Annunzio.
Santa Chiara
Instead, confetti, as we know them today, date to the 15th century when melted sugar cane replaced honey, as the sweetener. The earliest documents mentioning the use of sugar cane and confetti are in the local archives of Sulmona, a small and old town in the Abruzzi, (whose name derives from Solima, one of Aneas’s closest friends) and date to 1492/93. Around that time the nuns at the Sulmona’s convent of Santa Chiara started the tradition of wrapping sugar-coated almonds with silk threads of different colors and tying them together to create bouquets of flowers, bunches of grapes, ears of wheat, and rosaries, as gifts for young brides, noblemen, magistrates, and bishops.
Today glossy paper of different colors has replaced the silk thread and Sulmona, long been nicknamed “La Città dei Confetti” or “Confetti City”, is still the center of Italy’s confetti production, its streets lined with stores selling the above-mentioned confetti creations, but also ladybugs, butterflies, comic book and TV characters, to name but a few such party favors, a tradition unique to Sulmona.
By 1846 there were 12 confetti “factories” in Sulmona including today’s two most important: “Pelino” which dates to 1783 and is run today by the family’s 8th generation and “William Di Carlo” which dates to 1833 and is run today by the family’s sixth generation. Its present director William Di Carlo told me an interesting family anecdote: “In 1909, according to an Ellis Island register, my great-grandfather Alfredo Di Carlo and his wife Rosina La Civita immigrated to New York where he worked at Tiffany’s as a cesellatore or jewel engraver. To Americanize the family, even before leaving, they named their first-born William, but then left him in Sulmona in the custody of Rosina’s maiden Zia Chiara. They had six more children in New York, but I don’t know if they ever saw their William again.”
William Di Carlo, grandfather of the present CEO William Di Carlo
Besides its “factory” “Pelino” houses a two-storied 3-room museum of its early machines, tools, publicity posters, awards, documents, family portraits and photographs, a collection of bomboniere, a reconstructed workshop of confetti production, and the first telephone to have been installed in Sulmona. (Via Stazione Introdacqua 55, entrance free, open Monday-Saturday 8:30-12:30/3-6 PM, closed Sundays and holidays).
Pelino “Factory” and Museum
In addition to Di Carlo and Pelino in Sulmona, the Crispo family, now in its fourth generation, has been producing confetti in San Giuseppe Vesuviano near Naples since 1890 and today exports them to 120 countries. Agnone in Molise, also famous for the production of church bells, is appreciated for its confetti as is Trani in Puglia, where a pastry shop, founded by Nicola Mucci, now named for his son Giovanni, has produced them since 1894 and also houses the museo del confetto, like Pelino’s, displaying utensils and documents.
Besides confetti the poet Ovid was born in Sulmona
Although today Italy is considered the patria or homeland of confetti, Greece, the Middle East, France, Spain, and Portugal, also can claim a long tradition of confetti production.
Like Italy, in Greece and the Middle East the tradition dates to ancient times and confetti are considered aphrodisiacs so are plentiful at weddings.
In France, confetti are called dragée. They were first introduced in 1220 by a pharmacist in the town of Verdun to give medicines a more pleasant taste. The French soon believed that they helped digestion, and, because they made people happy, also cured sterility.
In Spain, confetti are called peladillas. Although they have been produced since the 1880s particularly in Casinos, in the province of Valencia, and in Alcoy, in the province of Alicante, it seems that the Spanish started to produce sugar-coated peladillas at the same time as the nuns in Sulmona.
Instead of party favors, in Portugal, where there called amêndoas de Páscoa, confetti are the traditional Easter gift, not chocolate eggs.
In the United States, confetti were introduced by immigrants from southern Italy. Now they are widely available for purchase worldwide on numerous websites.
Nota Bene: Confetti, which take two days to make, should contain no flour or starch. To test its authenticity, place one in a glass of water. The water becomes cloudy, it means that starch is present. A sugared almond without starch leaves the water clear.