Corpus Christi processions developed strikingly different local forms as the feast spread across the Catholic world: towns across central Italy, most famously Spello and Genzano, cover entire processional streets with elaborate temporary carpets of flower petals, the infiorata, a folk art tradition that has become a significant local tourist event in its own right, while in Cusco, Peru, the feast absorbed and stands close beside elements of the pre-Columbian Inca solar festival Inti Raymi, historically suppressed by Spanish colonial authorities but observed in the same June season, producing a Corpus Christi celebration in the Andes that carries visible indigenous Andean as well as Catholic elements in its processions and saint images.
These strongly localised forms illustrate a pattern common to many exported Catholic feasts, that a single papally mandated liturgical date, fixed centrally in the way this entry's first article describes, can generate very different lived observances once it takes root in a given place, absorbing local artistic traditions, agricultural cycles or even the ritual calendar of a religion Catholic missionaries specifically intended to replace, so that celebrating Corpus Christi in Cusco and in rural Umbria today involves the same feast day but not remotely the same experience of it.