Brides close the Winter Olympics in Torino, Italy
In the Italian tradition of Carnival, ballerinas and brides, aerial acrobats and cart wheeling clowns celebrated the close of Turin's Winter Games on Sunday.
Coinciding with Italy's Mardi gras weekend, the carnival combined with the circus to close the Games that Olympic chiefs hailed as a success according to all reports.
To add to the excitement, the last gold medal to be given at the Games was placed around the neck of Giorgio di Centa whose win in the 50 km cross-country skiing produced a fairytale finale.
Thousands waved miniature Italian flags as his sister, Manuela, a member of the Olympic Committee, presented the gold. She won five medals at the 1994 Winter Games.
The formality of handing the Olympic flag to the mayor of Vancouver, Sam Sullivan, was completed as Canada took to the stage to invite the world to "come play with us in 2010."
Next, thousands of spectators wore devils' and angels' carnival masks and joined the extravagance on stage while grotesque, fanciful paper mache characters drawn from Viareggio masks trooped across the stage.
They were surrounded by volunteers dressed as Tarot cards.
Fortune tellers and mountain explorers, dressed all in white with silver ski goggles, danced for the Carnival King and Queen, who paraded across the stage.
People, dressed in white, flew in the night sky — buoyed by a stream of air in the center of the stage. A snowboarder rode the air to cheers of delight from the crowd.
Brass-band versions of the Village People's "YMCA" and Gloria Gaynor's "I will survive," were mixed with "Volare" and "Mambo Italiano."
But it was the early 19th century Italian composer Niccolo Paganini, who helped set a dramatic scene for the finale.
With a harp shooting flames, soldiers and devils entered to be greeted by an Italian rose seller who placed his flowers in the muzzles of their guns.
Then to lyrics sung by Italian tenor Andrea Bocelli, hundreds of brides flocked on the stage holding lamps and formed the shape of a dove. A white glow slowly darkened and the Olympic flame was extinguished. The brides closed the Winter Games in Turin.
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