Confetti

Since the Middle Ages, in northern Italy it was common usage for the participants of carnival parades to throw objects at the crowd, mostly mud balls, eggs, coins or fruit.

In 1597, the city governor Juan Fernández de Velasco y Tovar imposed a ban on egg-throwing and squittaroli (spraying liquids in the street)[4] along with other immoral behaviors.

Those were officially defined as the only material allowed to be thrown during the parades in an edict by the Prefect of Milan in 1808, but the battles fought with them in the 1800s became too large and dangerous, with hundreds of people involved, leading to a ban of the chalk pellets.

[5] In 1875, an Italian businessman from Milan, Enrico Mangili, began selling paper confetti for use in the upcoming carnevale di Milano, the yearly parade held along the streets of the city.

Mangili begun collecting the small punched paper disks that were left as a byproduct from the production of the holed sheets used by the silkworm breeders as cage bedding, and selling them for profit.

Some wedding venues have decided that due to the mess and potential inconvenience caused by the use of confetti to ban its usage completely.

The English word confetti (to denote Jordan almonds) is adopted from the Italian confectionery of the same name, which was a small sweet traditionally thrown during carnivals.

[citation needed] Also known as dragée or comfit, Italian confetti are almonds with a hard sugar coating; their name equates to French confit.

The British adapted the missiles to weddings (displacing the traditional grains or rice symbolising sexual fertility) at the end of the 19th century, using symbolic shreds of coloured paper rather than real sweets.