Fat Thursday
"Giovedì grasso" (Fat Thursday) is celebrated in Italy, but it is not very different from "martedì grasso" (Shrove Tuesday). In Venice at the turn into the twentieth century, for example, it was marked by "masquerades, a battle of flowers on the Plaza, a general illumination and the opening of the lottery". The English writer Marie Corelli mentioned "Giovedi Grasso" in her second novel, "Vendetta" (1886), as a day when "the fooling and the mumming, the dancing, shrieking, and screaming would be at its height."