Asti's Festival of Festivals
The Festival of Festivals (Festival delle Sagre in Italian) is a unique event that celebrates the customs and traditions of country life: it takes place in Asti over the weekend of the second Sunday in September every year.[1] It is one of the key events of the "Asti September", the others being the Douja d'Or national wine show (which lasts ten days) and the Palio of Asti that runs on the third Sunday of September. By established tradition it begins on Saturday night and runs all day Sunday: however, the Saturday evening event usually attracts the higher number of visitors. Over the course of two days, the festival now attracts more than two hundred thousand visitors each year.
The Sunday event starts at 09:45 with a colorful parade that winds through the streets of the city, representing the rural values and traditions of the province with more than three thousand characters in authentic period costumes.
The beginnings of the festival of Festivals can be traced to an idea of Giovanni Borello, president of the Chamber of Commerce of Asti, in 1974: his plan was to augment the Douja d'Or, essentially a wine competition, with a festival celebrating a bygone rural world. The intention of the organizers was to particularly stress the gastronomic aspect of the event, presenting in one place the unique local dishes of the area, complementing the local wines and attracting large numbers of people.
Food and wine fair
The Festival delle Sagre features Italy's largest open-air restaurant, offering all the flavours and aromas of authentic Piedmont cuisine. More than 40 Pro Loco organizations of the Province of Asti present their specialties, accompanied by Asti DOC and DOCG wines, from stalls set up in Asti's large, central 'Campo del Palio' square, arranged to re-create an old village atmosphere.
Both written and oral recipes created by generations of rural people are dusted off each year to present a great menu, prepared using carefully-chosen ingredients that are typical for the Asti region. The Festival of Festivals offers a choice of over eighty different dishes, all rich in flavor, and some now unusual - such as rice with Barbera d'Asti, Polenta with wild boar stew, rabbit agnolotti, fried bleak (alborelle - a type of fish), farinata (belecauda in Asti dialect) or bollitto with bagnetto verde. Some dishes are prepared in almost industrial quantities - in 2004 over 4,000 kg of rabbit agnolotti were consumed - and are always sold at popular prices.
The parade
Starting on Sunday morning at 9.45 a.m, a long procession files through the Asti streets, based on the theme of country life up to the early twentieth century. The procession is undoubtedly the most spectacular and exciting part of the festival, with more than 3000 characters in authentic period clothing, work tools, furnishings and fixtures of all kinds, antique tractors, agricultural machines, wagons and tractors, plus a veritable domestic zoo with various oxen, horses, mules, donkeys and other animals. The procession recreates memorable scenes of peasant life, punctuated by the changing seasons, organized to resemble a living museum.
The procession winds through the streets of downtown for about two hours, and culminates with the food and wine fair which runs from noon until the evening.