Jamie's Great Escape Jamie in Le Marche

Date Published:

24/10/2007

Festivals of food

Jamie's pasta making competition with the Mamas from Le Marche is part of a well-loved tradition in Italy. The English have their village fêtes, with tombolas and coconut shies. In Italy, the locals get together to celebrate their local foods at a sagra.

Thousands of sagre take place around Italy to celebrate a particular food or wine from that area, In Le Marche, the region where Jamie visited the Sagre de Mercatello, nearly every town and village has at least one festival during the summer.

Family affairs

To the British, it may seem strange to have a festival devoted purely to pecorino cheese or stuffed flatbread. For Italians, though, these events are a high point of the year for all the family, with funfairs, music and dancing as well as food and wine.

Most of the festivals have a historical context. The polenta festival in Corinaldo on the third Sunday in July commemorates the time when the townspeople successfully resisted a siege thanks to copious supplies of the stuff. Other sagre celebrate local specialities such as wild boar, trout or newly pressed olive oil.

Local life

American Rebecca Winke lives in Assisi and she says of sagre on the Slow Italy website: 'If you really want to see how the Italians in rural Italy live, your best bet is to head to the nearest sagra.

'Imagine your church youth group organised a dinner and bazaar that lasted 10 days and involved feeding about 1,000 people a night. Total chaos would reign.

'Well, that's pretty much what it is. A booth where you order your food, a big tent where you sit at long tables with complete strangers and eat off plastic plates, a couple of carnival-type booths where you can shoot cans or play the lottery for prizes, and a dance floor.

'And hundreds of people shouting orders, bustling around with trays of food, eating with gusto, and trying to talk over each other.'

Real Italy

The sagre usually last about 10 days and take place in the evening. The purpose is to raise money for the local community while having a great time. You may find that you are the only tourists there so this will give you a chance to take meet some real Italians - just as Jamie did.

To find a sagra while you're in Italy, contact the local tourist office or look out for posters in the area advertising the events and head down there. You'll have a fantastic evening and enjoy great local food.