Contracted ideals and the Groebner fan of the rational normal curve

The paper has two goals: the study the associated graded ring of contracted homogeneous ideals in $K[x,y]$ and the study of the Groebner fan of the ideal $P$ of the rational normal curve in ${\bf P}^d$. These two problems are, quite surprisingly, very tightly related. We completely classify the contracted ideals with a Cohen-Macaulay associated graded rings in terms of the numerical invariants arising from Zariski's factorization. We determine explicitly all the initial ideals (monomial or not) of $P$ that are Cohen-Macaulay.