L'Italo-Americano

E v e r y A u g u s t , a v i l l a g e i n t h e deep heel of Italy performs a small miracle of arith- metic; we are talking about Cannole, in Salento, a vil- l a g e h o m e t o a b o u t 1 , 5 0 0 people for fifty weeks of the year where, over five days in the middle of the summer, something close to 100,000 visitors pour in. They come for a snail, not a metaphori- cal one, but the actual local land snail, the municed- dha, gathered after the rains and cooked here three ways, alla cannolese with onion and wine, in a red sauce, or simply roasted over the coals. The town has thrown this party in the creature's honor every year since 1985, but the connection of Cannole with snails dates further back, if it's true that its people have been known as the cuzzari, the snail-gatherers, for time immemorial. The example of Cannole is n o t u n i q u e , t h o u g h . I t a l y holds thousands of these vil- lage food fairs through the w a r m m o n t h s , a n d m a n y more between spring and fall. Most honor the usual sus- p e c t s , t h e n e w w i n e , t h e chestnut, the porcini, but the o n e s w o r t h c r o s s i n g t h e country for, though, are the others: fairs devoted to a sin- gle, hyper-local product that almost nobody outside its own valley has ever tasted, a thing so simple and particu- l a r t h a t a w h o l e t o w n h a s decided to wear it as a badge. A sagra of this kind is really campanilismo – the fierce I t a l i a n l o v e o f o n e ' s o w n place expressed, for once, not against the next town over b u t t h r o u g h t h e l o v e f o r something typical of one's own – turned edible. F o l l o w t h e c a l e n d a r o n from August, and the roll-call o n l y g e t s s t r a n g e r . F o r instance, in the Iblei moun- tains of south-eastern Sicily, t h e l i t t l e t o w n o f G i a r - ratana gives three days in the middle of the month to an onion. But what an onion! The cipolla di Giarratana is a flat, pale giant, sweet e n o u g h t o e a t a l m o s t l i k e fruit, and a single bulb can weigh a couple of pounds; for the sagra, now past its forty- fifth year, the townsfolk cook it every way imaginable and serve it with local cheese and wine while the streets fill with stalls. To an outsider, it c a n s o u n d l i k e a f e s t i v a l about nothing, but to Giar- ratana, it is a festival about everything the town is. In Tuscany, the handsome hill town of Colle di Val d ' E l s a , n e a r S i e n a , h a s recently created a fall festival with the wonderful dialect n a m e B a d a c h e G o t a , roughly "mind that cheek," in honour of its gota cotta, the local pork cheek that is cured, boiled, and spiced i n t o a s o f t p i n k d e l i c a c y barely known a valley away. Up in Piedmont, south of Turin, the village of Cer- v e r e i s s o d e v o t e d t o i t s leeks that it has built them a permanent home, a hall the locals cheerfully call the Palaporro, the "leek palace", where every November the long, sweet porro di Cervere is honored with the serious- n e s s o t h e r p l a c e s i n t h e region save for truffles. But some of these fairs have outgrown the village e n t i r e l y a n d b e c o m e a national (even internation- al!) phenomenon, just like in Treviso, the Veneto town that has long claimed to be tiramisù's birthplace. Here, the local dessert has been turned into a global sporting event, the Tiramisù World C u p , h e l d e a c h O c t o b e r , where hundreds of non-pro- fessional competitors from around the world compete under the judges' spoons to build the perfect mix of cof- f e e , m a s c a r p o n e , a n d savoiardi. It may have start- ed as a local competition but today has become, without ever losing its good humour, a g e n u i n e w o r l d c h a m p i - onship of pudding. And then there are the sagre that leave tradition behind altogether in favor of pure surprise. The oddest of the lot may be the Sagra dello Struzzo, the ostrich f e s t i v a l , a t P o z z u o l o d e l F r i u l i n e a r U d i n e , w h i c h since 1997 has built its long tables around the meat of a bird nobody associates with Italy at all. If Cannole shows how deep a food tradition can run, Pozzuolo shows the opposite: a community does- n't even need centuries of h i s t o r y t o r a l l y a r o u n d a plate, only something it can call its own. What all of them share, snail and onion and leek and ostrich alike, is a particular kind of civic love, because a sagra is not really a market- ing exercise, whatever the t o u r i s t b o a r d m a y h o p e ; rather, it is the day a place stops and celebrates itself, out loud, through the one flavour it grew up on. The v o l u n t e e r s p e e l i n g t h e onions and stirring the vats are the same faces all year r o u n d , t h e P r o L o c o , t h e p a r i s h , t h e o l d m e n w h o have worked the grill since before the young cooks were born, and for a few warm e v e n i n g s t h e w h o l e t o w n e a t s a t l o n g t a b l e s i n t h e street and argues over whose grandmother's recipe is the true one. The product is only ever the excuse, it's all about the idea of belonging. T h a t i s w h y a l e e k c a n become the soul of a village, and why a grandmother's recipe for it gets defended at the table like a birthright. T h e s e f a i r s a r e a k i n d o f memory you can eat. Go to one (pick the strangest name you can find!) and you will taste not only a snail or an onion but the funny, stub- born, unbreakable attach- ment of Italians to the small patch of ground that made them. PAULA REYNOLDS A Snail, an onion, an ostrich: Italy's most curious village fairs THURSDAY, AUGUST 6, 2026 www.italoamericano.org 16 L'Italo-Americano Volunteers prepare food during an Italian village sagra, where cooking together turns a local ingredient into a shared celebration ALL AROUND ITALY TRAVEL TIPS DESTINATIONS ACTIVITIES

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