Mario Cucinella Designs Vegetal Mountain Float for Palermo's Festino di Santa Rosalia

For its 402nd edition, Palermo's Festino di Santa Rosalia abandons the traditional ship-shaped float for a vegetal mountain designed by Mario Cucinella's studio MCA. The float, a cubist-like mountain featuring trees and plants from Monte Pellegrino, departs from the 17th-century iconography of the triumphal vessel. Cucinella described it as a metaphor rather than a ship, drawing on the biodiversity of Monte Pellegrino, where ecologist George Evelyn Hutchinson proposed making Santa Rosalia the patron saint of biodiversity in the 1950s. The float includes a statue of Saint Rosalia by Filippo Sapienza. The festival, rooted in the 1624 plague miracle, is organized by ODD Agency in partnership with CoopCulture. The last major ship float was designed by Jannis Kounellis in 2007, now restored and exhibited at Museo Riso.