They go on all year, all over Italy, but for some reason it’s only in the autumn that I give any thought to the innumerable festivals dedicated to food. Or food products, or plants or animals, or anything peptic or nutritious.
This sign in the village of Giavera del Montello is announcing the local "Sagra dei Spinei," which are the stoppers of the wine barrels. In case these don't sound especially tasty, the point of the sagra is to drink the newly fermented contents of the barrels, plus the traditional accompanying roasted chestnuts. Why didn't they just say "Sagra del vino"? You'll have to ask them.
The keyword is sagra, which the dictionary defines as “feast,” “festival,” or “religious festival,” because the local product being celebrated is sometimes linked to the local patron saint. Not required, though. It’s more the local product that is worshiped and glorified. Anyway, the public tends to respond more quickly to the phrases “gastronomic stands” and “typical products” than to “religious procession and Mass,” and these events are usually aimed at the paying visitor, not the quaint locals who in days of yore would have been the only participants.
Rummaging through assorted calendars for something fun and comestible to celebrate this month in the Veneto , I discovered that in October there are sagre devoted to chestnuts, pumpkins, cheese, grapes, jujubes (known in Venetian as zizoe), honey, wine, baccala’, black truffles, ducks, walnuts, apples, eels, and the gnocco (plural gnocchi, since you tend not to eat just one). This one is tempting, as “gnocco” is also slang for “dullard,” “poltroon,” “dimwit,” which I think is funny, though I assume the organizers are not referring to the people they want to attract.
If they set up stands of fresh-picked chile peppers at the Automotive Dealers' Day, do you think anyone would think it odd?
I see that “Automotive Dealer Day” sneaked its way onto the list for the area around Verona. Hard to think of what would be good to eat here, though I guess 40W oil might be useful for frying. Maybe this is one event in which food isn’t involved, hard as that may be to imagine. Unless they are cleverly referring to the automotive dealer as the edible item.
The few sagre I’ve been to tend to follow a simple pattern: Pick a local product you wish to festivize; get lots of it; organize it on stands or in halls, possibly with demonstrations of its cultivation, history, industrial management, recipes, or whatever other features seem important; cook lots of it in various ways to sell at inflated prices; add some extra events, such as demonstrations of historic skills (how to make cheese or spin wool or other things the old-fashioned way is popular); perhaps add some race or competitive event; publicize, provide parking (this one is optional), make money.
Oh — and make sure you hold your event in a picturesque little place that is almost (or better, completely) unreachable by public transport. Trains? Buses? Of course they exist, except on Sunday, when often they do not. Then you get off at the nearest station and try to find a taxi or, as happened last year, you walk. We did eight miles. Lino has made it clear that we are not going to repeat this exploit.
The pumpkin known as "zucca barucca" is also called the "veal of Chioggia." Gives you some idea of the subsistence level down there. I can imagine mothers telling their children, "Eat it -- it tastes just like veal."
The problem is that any sagra reasonably near home base isn’t very appealing. You need distance, even a frustrating distance, to create the necessary allure. Because — let’s be honest — spending the day wandering among pumpkins or grapes doesn’t have a lot more intrinsic appeal than spending the day in the produce department of the supermarket. Spending the day among gnocchi — why travel? As soon as you walk out the door here, you’re surrounded by them. So to speak.
I spent two days trying to organize the logistics to go to Arqua’ Petrarca, which devotes two consecutive Sundays to its local star, the zizoe. In fact, I had my heart set on it. This is always a bad move, because disappointment is usually right behind. I discovered that while a train does go to the nearest town, Monselice, there are two choices for traveling the four miles (six kilometers) to Arqua’ Petrarca. The first was by taxi — there is one taxi in Monselice — and the driver wanted 20 euros ($27) each way. You see that it’s not only in Venice where they flay your wallet alive. Or the bus. I checked, not without some difficulty, with the bus company, and guess what? They don’t run on Sunday.
I myself would seriously considering getting a folding bicycle , which would be easy to carry on the train, but Lino didn’t want to hear about it. He may have sensed I was edging too close to committing an Americanata.
I forgot to mention that for us to arrive at a sagra at a reasonable hour (say, 9:00 AM, when it might be opening), it means getting up at 4:00. Because to be at the train station by 6:00 or so means there is only one vaporetto running — sorry, I meant crawling. So if I’m prepared to get up in the middle of the night like some shift worker in a Christmas-ornament factory, the sagroids — or however the organizers are called — ought to make some provision for me.
Sending a limousine would be acceptable.
I think they should have a sagra of the sunset. The best thing is, you don't have to buy anything, not even a ticket on a bus or train that doesn't exist.
When the sunlight looks like this, it's time for the party to start.
The dust has now settled on the festa of San Piero de Casteo and everyone is recovering (or not) from the toil, excitement, racket, and nearly suffocating odors of frying fish and charring ribs.
Fine as all this may be, it used to be, in many ways, even better. Lino Penzo, president of the Remiera Casteo (our very local rowing club), was born in the next campo over, an open space named Campo Ruga. And he remembers it the old way.
“There wasn’t anything here,” he said, looking at the stretch of grass in front of the church. The party was in Campo Ruga where, to hear him tell it, as many people lived as in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Families everywhere. Kids everywhere. Drama without any pause for station identification. “We used to put cushions on the windowsill,” Lino said, “and just watch what was going on outside. It was like the theatre, it never stopped.”
There was the day a certain man went across to the osteria to drink some wine. Evidently his wife expressed the opinion that he was doing this far too often, so he locked her in the house and went anyway. So she fixed up a bedsheet and let herself down through the window. I don’t know if she chased him around the campo brandishing a rolling pin, but I can imagine it.
And there was a woman whose nerves would give out whenever there was a fight in the family (evidently she preferred the “flight” option of the famous pair of possibilities), and she’d suddenly go into a swoon. Everybody knew this, so when anybody heard the sound of nearby strife the men in the cafe would put out a chair for her. They knew she’d be needing it to fall onto, sooner or later, so they got ready.
And there were shops everywhere. The series of doors we see today, many of them shut forever, belonged to a collection of every enterprise necessary for human life. Two (two!) bakeries, fruit and vegetable vendors, a butcher, a cheese and milk shop, a cobbler, probably also an undertaker, though he didn’t mention it. I don’t remember the rest, but they were all there. You didn’t have to go more than 20 steps from home to buy everything you needed. As in most Venetian neighborhoods, going to San Marco was unknown, mainly because it was pointless. This was the world.
This is Campo Ruga on a typical morning. True, there are usually people traversing it on their way to hither and to yon, but the lone trattoria is now the only reason to stop. We just have to imagine this with a few thousand people in it, night and day, like every other campo used to be.
As for the festa, it was celebrated in the campo, and involved mostly eating. Long tables were set up, where everyone sat and ate tons — “tons” — of bovoleti, and sarde in saor, and other traditional Venetian food.
Eventually one day somebody suggested moving over to the big empty grassy area in front of the church, and put up a little stand with some food. From there, the festa just got bigger and bigger, and ultimately never went back to Campo Ruga.
So now we have live music and big balloons and grilled animals and gondola rides, and a big mass with the patriarch, and even a cake competition. It’s like the county fair, without quilts.
I wish I could know what she was telling him. Whatever it was, he was paying attention. Obviously he hadn't yet been crazed by sugar, fat, and all the stuff the other kids had.Greta was creating with the concentration of an icon-painter. Evidently knowing her creation was going to be gone tomorrow had no importance whatever. She's obviously destined for greatness.
There was a lot of this going on. It was great.
One man was producing these tumuli of french fries, but it took four people to study the numbered bits of paper to figure out which desperate customer got the next boxful.
This lone woman stood over vats of boiling spaghetti like the Delphic oracle, and after five nights of this she could probably have made a few prophecies herself.The last ray of light in a dying universe will be the gleam of the cell phone of a teenage girl.
This useful sign may look completely at home here, except for one thing. Why isn't it in Italian? If they'd wanted to look really cool, they ought to have written it in Latvian. DARBINIEKIEM TIKAI. That certainly would have gotten people's attention..
I knew two days ago what the weather was going to be last night. I knew it without checking the barometer, or the online weather forecast, or the newspaper. In fact, I knew it a year ago.
All I have to do is check the calendar.
June 29 is the Feast of St. Peter, as you know. And as everyone else knows — at least around here — that means there will be thunder. Probably rain. Possibly even hail, but that’s not so common.
Someone unknown to me has undoubtedly long since figured out why this is. All I know is that St. Peter likes thunder. They tell frightened children he’s cleaning the wine barrels. As time goes on there probably won’t be any children left who know what a wine barrel looks like, but I suppose St. Peter could be cleaning barrels full of discounted, slightly damaged designer handbags.
What St. Peter also oversees is one of the best festivals in Venice. Maybe anywhere. The festa of San Piero de Casteo, held on the greensward in front of the eponymous church (for centuries the cathedral of Venice), is a great moment in the neighborhood year. It’s five evenings of fun, frolic, and food, and dogs and kids and free gondola rides and also loud music that goes on far into the night. (St. Peter cleaning the Bose amplifiers?)
The proceeds, the fruit of phenomenal labor by squadrons of scouts and parishioners, some of whom in other places might have been expected to be doing nothing more strenuous than changing channels, are donated to all sorts of charitable causes.
The first people come with some semblance of tranquility and control. It doesn't last long.
Last night, being Wednesday, and the first night, the crowd was reasonably small, which meant you could still see grass and bits of walkway. The big event was the performance of “I Rusteghi,” one of the many famous Venetian comedies by the extremely famous and important Carlo Goldoni (1707 – 1793). A live performance of a certified classic — and for free. You can’t get that every day.
We wandered over there last night to get in the mood for the next few days; we (or at least I) needed to start strengthening my mental muscles to confront Friday and Saturday night, the peak moments of this event.
One of life's great mysteries: That it's more interesting to look at the person sitting next to you on a screen than it is to just turn to look at him or her for real.
It’s not so much the blasting music, which we can hear from our little hovel 293 meters/962 feet away, because eventually the band packs up and goes home.
It’s the enthusiastic shouting of overexcited people walking home, all of them funneling down the street which is just outside our bedroom window. It’s like having 2,000 people yelling good-night for an hour standing right in front of the bed.
We shut the windows and turn the fan on “high.” The only other solution would be to go to the mountains every night.
Still, if for some reason this didn’t occur, I’d be sorry. It would be like not having thunder or lightning or hail. It would be wrong.
And yes, it did rain last night, but only some time after midnight so as not to spoil the party. St. Peter thinks of everything.
Here the holiday season breaks down roughly into three categories: Food, Religion, and Santa. (I include “presents” under “Santa,” unless you’re giving somebody gold, frankincense, and/or myrrh.) I can’t think of any component which wouldn’t fit in at least one of those columns.
Santas are everywhere, especially for sale.
My impression is that the adults respond to the first, children to the third, and somewhere in there religion jostles to find a place, as if it were stuck inside a vaporetto churning toward December 25 and can’t manage to get off at the right stop because everybody is blocking the aisle with their strollers, shopping carts, enormous bags, and equally enormous selves. Yes, it’s a project here, as in many places, to feel that Christmas is anything other than a big blobby holiday everybody loves or hates for their own reasons.
This is not to say that people don’t acknowledge any religious aspect of the day — they do. By the admission of many, it’s one of the few times a year that they pass through the church doors. And virtually every church boasts its own Nativity scene, many of which are appealingly homemade. I don’t know if the big mega-shopping centers on the mainland display the Nativity in any form other than in a box with a price tag — I have never gone over there before the holidays and I don’t feel like risking what remains of my equilibrium by trying it.
But if I’ve never gone, why do I assume it’s bedlam? Two words which apply to life on the mainland: Kids and cars.
Here is our order of march for the festive three days (yes, we get a bonus, thanks to St. Stephen).
Buy groceries/send cards/clean and decorate hovel. Seeing that we have no space for anything larger than a paper clip, we skip the tree. I drape some festoons around the heavy forcola made for rowing in the stern of a balotina. I call it the Christmas Forcola and I really like it. And after all, it was a tree once.
The first year I did this, Lino regarded it as a possibly ominous sign of an incurable urge Americans are known to have to come up with impulsive, unorthodox, possibly unnecessary, vaguely embarrassing stunts. These are generically called americanate (ah-mer-i-cahn-AH-teh). Americanate of any sort fly in the face of The Way We’ve Always Done It and are sure to draw more ridicule than appreciation. Even if you commit one of these acts in the privacy of your own home, your Italian consort will still feel that the Natural Order of Things has been disagreeably disturbed. I learned early on that they’re not worth it. But the Christmas Forcola stays.
Christmas Eve: Big dinner. It is always based on fish, and more precisely, in the manner of Venetian families since the Bronze Age, the menu is this:
Antipasto — anything you like and can afford, which in our case rules out baccala’ in most forms but does allow space for smoked herring, anchovies, and some Ukrainian caviar we were given.
These are the lagoon gobies known as go'. They are approaching their moment of glory, if they but knew it.
First course: Risotto of go‘. You may remember we scored a small trap for snaring these lagoon fish, but we’ve also fished for them by looking for their lairs and then inserting an arm (Lino’s arm, I’ll admit) down into it till the fish is grasped. For years the go’ was one of the many humble and abundant fish on which families relied, and was consequently very cheap. In that era, sea bass and bream were elite creatures which cost three times what you’d pay for go’. Now the situation is reversed: Thanks to fish farms, bass and bream are sold at fire-sale prices (7 euros a kilo, or $5 per pound), and go’ now costs 18 euros a kilo ($12 a pound). Lino can’t get over it.
Anyway, risotto of go’ is a profoundly Venetian dish, so profound that you hardly ever find it on restaurant menus. The memory of this comestible has almost disappeared under the onslaught of Norwegian salmon and French turbot.
Second course: Roasted eel. You could also simmer your pieces of eel in tomato sauce, but throwing chunks of this creature on the griddle and then opening all the windows to let out the smoke from its burning fat is part of Christmas. It is extremely delectable and I have come to count on it as part of the holiday tastefest.
Pieces of eel neatly removed from their bone, ready for the griddle.
And I realize how blessed we are to be able to eat it, considering that Lino remembers there were people, when he was a lad (and for centuries before, probably), who were so poor that they would go to the fish market on Christmas Eve and ask the vendors for the offal — the heads and innards of the eels — to have something to make their risotto with. I did not make that up and neither did he.
Yes, you can have bass or bream or canned tuna or whatever else you might prefer. But eel is the Ur-fish for Christmas Eve. Just for the record.
Then we eat some pieces of Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese, which is the perfect antidote to the fish taste lingering in your mouth. (Actually, we eat its humbler cousin, a cheese called grana padano. Sorry, but it’s just as good.)
Now you can get panettone that is iced and festooned. Where will it end?
Then some radicchio from Treviso, either chopped as a salad or grilled on the stove. The bitterness perfectly offsets the cheese flavor lingering in your mouth.
Yes, it’s all been figured out and would be very hard to improve on, in my view.
Then there’s a free-for-all involving nuts, fruit, and nougat (soft? hard? with almonds? peanuts? it’s up to you). And if you like — and I certainly do — a few spoonfuls of mostarda, which comes in various styles but which is essentially applesauce that has been debauched by the sharpest mustard imaginable, studded with pieces of candied, flaming-flavored fruit. If you remember Red-Hots, you only have to imagine them as nuggets of fruit.
This, and opening the presents, gets you to the verge of midnight, and it’s off to mass. They tend not to do pageants, but there is a smattering of Christmas songs which tag the event as festive. You wouldn’t know it by the songs themselves; if you hadn’t been informed that it’s Christmas, the music would lead you to suppose that the ritual was something between Ash Wednesday and the Day of the Dead.
I will resist the temptation to express my views on how the glorious traditions of music have deteriorated in the old Belpaese; I’ll just say not to expect to be hearing soaring cantatas or any of the sublime compositions with which the great masters, many of them Italian, blessed the world. If you think of church music here nowadays, at least at the parish level, you must imagine peeling plaster set to two guitars and a piano played by someone who hasn’t yet taken his second lesson.
The congregation does sing “Adeste Fidelis” and “Silent Night,” but in the most lugubrious way possible. If it were any more lugubrious, the singing would come to a complete stop. There is also a special Christmas song (undoubtedly there are more, but it’s the only one I hear around here) called “Tu scendi dalle stelle“ (You came down from the stars) which in its sincerity and simplicity could really squeeze your heart. Unfortunately, this too is sung as a dirge. Happily, I have found a version which gives much more of a sense of the beauty of this little carol; the translation isn’t very good but it’s better than nothing. Meanwhile, though, I think the music will have the desired effect.
You get home past 1:00 AM but don’t think you’re headed straight to bed: First you have to eat some slabs of panettone and drink some prosecco.
Eating and drinking: What an original idea; it’s only been two hours since we hauled ourselves up from the table.
Then it’s off to bed, so we can sleep until it’s time to get up on Christmas morning. Which means going to mass (again), but this time at the basilica of San Marco, followed by MORE FOOD.
Christmas lunch! Tortellini in broth, an elixir made yesterday by simmering beef and chicken and a couple of hefty beef bones along with onion, celery and carrot. It’s going to be heavenly, I can tell just by looking at it.
For Lino as a lad, and for mostly everyone else, Christmas was food. “Who knew anything about presents?” he recalled rhetorically. “We hardly had a tree, either. At Christmas you ate — you ate things you didn’t have at any other time of year.” His mother made the pasta herself, and then the tortellini. Then came hunks of the boiled meat. In the evening, veal roast with polenta. Lest you imagine his Christmas as something Dickensian, he knew people — they lived upstairs — who didn’t have meat, period. I know some elderly Venetians who recall that the crowning moment of any holiday meal was chicken.
We will be preparing something radically different for Christmas evening (but not so radical as to qualify as an americanata): Roast pork with fennel seeds. Oddly enough, this unusual recipe got the official stamp of “Well, let’s give it a try” approval. This decision was pushed over the top by my enthusiasm for roast pork, which I think he may never have tasted. I hope my memories have not deceived me, as they so often do.
This is verging dangerously close to being an americanata. That, or the house is inhabited entirely by children.
But it’s not over: The next day is the feast of Santo Stefano, a national holiday not unlike Boxing Day in England. There are no rules about the menu, but it’s not composed of leftovers. Generally, assorted configurations of relatives get together for this too. Hours and hours spent sitting at a table; even if you eat just one bite (well fine, two bites) of what’s offered, you will go home feeling like one of those inflatable punching clowns.
Back in the Great Days, the celebration of the feast of Santo Stefano was remarkable, even for Venice. When the body — the entire body, not just a tidbit — of Christianity’s first martyr was brought to Venice from Constantinople in 1009 AD, it was placed beneath the high altar of the church of San Giorgio Maggiore. (Yes, there is a church of Santo Stefano, but it was built later and by then, everyone was used to the relics being elsewhere.)
The story goes that the people rushed to implore doge Ottone Orseolo to go venerate this relic on the feast of Santo Stefano, and to require their descendants to do likewise every year. He obliged, and this event became a national holiday (of the nation of Venice, obviously).
In fact, the ducal visit became two: One on Christmas night, and one on the following morning. The reason for this has not been revealed to me, but I can report that the nocturnal visit (the one time in the year that the doge was allowed to leave the Doge’s Palace at night) became an event that was spectacular, even for Venice.
In her classic work, Origine delle Feste Veneziane, Giustina Renier-Michiel outlines this moment (translated by me):
As soon as the Christmas mass was ended in San Marco, it was already getting dark. The doge boarded his magnificent barge [note: not the Bucintoro, but a slightly smaller craft known as a peatona], accompanied by his counselors, the Heads of the Quarantie [several bodies including the Supreme Court and the Mint], and other administrators, as well as the 41 men who had elected him doge.
He was preceded by boats carrying lights…and followed by innumerable small boats of every type, also supplied with lights, all together they covered the space between San Marco and the island of San Giorgio Maggiore. This area was illuminated also on the right and left by certain floating lamps called ludri, made of rope impregnated with pitch, which made a brilliant effect visible from far away, and whose reflections on the water produced a magical effect.
When His Serenity disembarked, he passed under an elegant covered gallery which had been specially constructed, all the way to the church door. On this occasion…the Dalmatian troops were lined up, gorgeously dressed, with the banner unfurled, the military band playing…
The doge was received at the church door by the Abbot; they exchanged greetings and entered the church together.
In the meantime, the Venetian noblewomen were disembarking from their gondolas, all of them dressed in black dresses with long trains, and their heads, necks, bosoms and ears were all adorned with precious jewels, their faces veiled with the most delicate black lace. Then they too entered the already crowded church.
Then of course the whole thing was repeated as everyone left the church and returned to Venice.
I can tell you that the holidays will not be resembling much of that — though I think I can dig out a fragment of a precious jewel somewhere. But it will be very close to that in my spirit, and I hope in yours also.
The best Nativity scene ever: Floating on a platform in front of the boathouse of the Generali Insurance Company rowing club.
