The most Italian event: the sagra

One town. One Dish. One Sagra.

Hi, I’m Peter, and you’re reading Anywhere Italy. Our mission is to cover the 1,000 Italian towns most travelers skip, in person, one at a time. To come along, join free, and go paid if you want to keep us on the road.

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Last week, we went to the Sagra della Pupporina e del Tordello event in Bozzano, Massarosa, Tuscany. In other words: it’s the celebration of the pupporina and the tordello in Bozzano. Ok, I think we need some translation here. So, pupporina is a butter cookie. Tordello is a meat-filled pasta, I wrote about it before. Bozzano is a small village in Massarosa, above Lake Massaciuccoli in Tuscany.

Now, the obvious question is: why is this a story? Well, it is, because you are hooked on how food is different in Italy compared to anything else, and Italy is the country of dolce vita, celebration of life, that’s why. And as always, none of this has anything to do with the common clichés: dolce vita has nothing to do with riding on a Vespa in Amalfi, and Italian food is not different because it tastes better. To be honest, dolce vita is a misunderstanding of a condemnation of hedonism by Fellini, and there is no such thing as Italian cuisine. But let’s not go too dark here. Let’s just say: if you want to understand why Italian food tastes so amazing and what a real celebration of life is, you have to understand what a sagra is.

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The sagra: one town, one dish, one party

If you are in Italy, you might see different event titles. Let’s quickly run through them.

Festival or festa. It’s mostly a religious event organized for a patron saint (every town has one). It’s about processions, relics, priests, a music band, and fireworks. Yeah, there’s food as well, sometimes it is connected to the town, but it is always in the background. The show is on/for the Church. It’s usually the Church that’s the organizer.

Carnevale. Viareggio (guide is here) has one. Venice has one. It’s mostly around or before Lent, and it is organized by the town itself. It’s a celebration: organized chaos, masks, satire, and mockery of the powerful. It’s a fun event with music, dancing, and a show. Food is fuel, mostly deep-fried stuff. No one goes to a carnival to eat.

Food festival. The classic one which you are most familiar with. Beer festival, meat festival, or just simply food festival. It’s a professional event with ticketed entry, vendors, kiosks, and so on. I’m sure everyone is familiar with it, every country has this. The main point: it is transportable. It doesn’t matter where it is, as it is rarely connected to a town.

And then there is the sagra, which is completely different from all the others.

The sagra is connected to one town, and it is about one dish, maybe two, which are somehow connected to that particular town. It’s an annual event. I know some countries have this, but the way Italy organizes this is completely different. More on that later. But this is the bottom line: one town, one dish, one party. It’s like a Celebration of the Philly Cheesesteak Sandwich every August 12th. I love that sammy, unrelated, but it is, of course, invented by Italians living in the US.

The way it is organized is absolutely Italian. There is a network of organizations called Pro Loco. I didn’t know who that was. I just saw the charge on my card during my festival, and the next day I was like, WTF, what’s this charge? It should be the festival, but it appears oddly on the card, just Pro Loco. Anyway, this is a network of volunteers, organized into a civil association or some sort, they are all from that local town, they make almost no money on this, they do it to celebrate that town and that dish, together. There are thousands of Pro Loco micronetworks in the country. They all do one thing: organize an annual event to sit down and stuff their mouths with local food, together with hundreds of other people.

The celebration of life, through local food. I’ve told you. This is dolce vita, and this hyperlocal gathering around one hyperlocal food is the reason why Italian food is so different from anything else.

I know this happens in other countries. In Hungary, we celebrate Békéscsaba sausages once a year. There are also wine festivals in each region. The difference in Italy is the scale of these events. Every weekend, there are, I am not joking, hundreds of them, everywhere. Just check the Sagre Toscane page. The list is endless. Also the size of these events: it’s small. Usually it’s 10 long tables, one canteen, a small podium, and some playground for kids.

I just love their posters, hilarious:

Sagra promos, wonderful

Famous ones are visited by many outsiders, including tourists. At the Pupporina Sagra, which we picked, well, we were the only ones not speaking Italian, let alone the mountain-Tuscan dialect… Everyone was super nice with us, but I saw some surprised eyes as in “who the heck are these people, they not from my village.”

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Why visit and how it works

So, I’ll be practical this time because we also had to learn this, and it took us all our Italian language skills to figure it out, so let us help you out.

First off, why visit? Aside from the fact that you are at an absolutely Italian event where you are probably the only non-Italian, and that alone is worth the experience? Well, it’s about the food, so come because of the food.

The food will be the freshest, simplest, and best Italian food that you will probably have, like, ever. When I say the food is prepared in an open kitchen by local grandmamas and grandpapas, I am absolutely not joking. This is the experience that makes influencers cry out loudly as omg so Italian. Sad that most influencers are busy attending pesto cooking classes organized only for tourists. But hey, influencers are not the sharpest knives in the drawer.

Here is proof. Though this is the start of the event, the kitchen nonnas just barely got their espresso and started cooking.

Second reason to come: I don’t go into an altered state when I say “sale 50%” on prices, but God, events like this are damn cheap. You really pay for the food, and the food only. We had two main dishes, one appetizer, endless bread, two desserts, water, two beers, and paid less than 40 EUR. I mean…

Now, how it works. Every sagra is different, but the general rules:

• Arrive around 7:30 pm, no earlier. It’s either closed or nothing is there. 8:30 pm is even better, by that time, the nonnas start cooking. Some sagras are all-day events, which means there is lunch too. Siesta is a thing, even on a sagra, so everything is absolutely closed from 2 pm till 7 pm.

• Some have pre-booked seating and table service. Don’t expect restaurant-level service, everyone is a young volunteer, but everyone is extremely nice and friendly. If you want a table, call them or arrive before opening.

• You pay at a kiosk labeled "cassa". From the menu (there’s always one, publicly everywhere), you pick what you want and pay. My recommendation: lines are long, and Italians are not Brits, so no one knows how to queue. Pick what you want and order once. The “but I forgot to order water” can quickly turn into 30 minutes standing, while your food gets cold.

• You hold onto your receipt, go to the kitchen, pick up your food, and sit down at the long table. If there is table service, you show it to the volunteers, sit down at the table, and they bring it for you. Also, if you're at table service, you can top up your order with the volunteers. There is no extra charge or tip for table service, by the way.

• Most sagras have some basic staples, like a pizzeria, a rosticceria (roasted meats), some beer taps, and a bar. In some cases, you can buy stuff from these directly, no need to get in line at the cassa. In our case, everything was handled via the cassa, but if you ordered pizza (why would you?), you go to the pizzeria to collect it, not to the kitchen.

• Parking is free, but arrive early or park elsewhere and walk in. There are no tickets to enter either.

• Location, that is probably the hardest one, because on most promo materials, there is only the name of the town. They probably think that if you are from there, you will know where the sagra is exactly. Well, we didn’t know, so we had to search for it. All it said: Bozzano. My tip: it’s a big event in a tiny town, so it’s either in their stadium, high school yard, church piazza, or something equivalent. But it is definitely in the centro, or on or near the main road. Ours was next to the main road, so it was easy to find it.

• You can pay by card. Almost always. But bring cash, just in case.

And lastly, obviously, depends on the event, but don’t expect that anyone will speak to you in any languages other than Italian. In some cases, even the Italian is so local that people like me, who learned classic Italian, struggle to understand it. But, as always, a big smile and some pantomime will get you really far. Everyone is super nice and happy that you are there, they are always trying everything to help you out.

So, normally, I don’t mix my practical how-tos with essays like this, but Sophie said it’s a brave thing to visit an event like this. We live here, so it’s different. But if I think about a traveler, an event like this might be a sink-or-swim style happening. If you are new, it’s hard to figure out how this works: what’s happening where, what to get, how to get it, how to find it, and so on. So, I thought maybe this practical detour can help. Because these events are 10000x better than any cooking class, food tour, or whatever bullshit you got sold to by tour operators.

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We came home early because we wanted to take a walk by the beach as well, so we left the sagra before 10 pm. Most Italians arrived around 9 pm, just saying… We’ve also stuffed so much food into our faces that we brought back the desserts in paper bags. It was a local-style donut and the world-famous pupporina, the event's namesake.

So, we took some bites from it before I made a photograph at home, but this is pupporina.

It’s basically a rounded thin cookie, heavy with butter, flavored with aniseed, and a candied cherry in the middle. I remember when I first saw the cookie and took a bite, what went through my head: “This? For real, this?!”

Yeah, this. This entire article should have been about this cookie, so it would click in your head the way it clicked in mine. The Italian village of Bozzano hosts an annual event for an absolutely simple cookie. It looks like a woman’s breast, by the way, intentionally, historically, this is a cookie that is made for kids during the festivity of Saint Bartholomew. The breast-shaped cookie resembles nurturing. During the procession, it gets blessed by the Church, then kids eat it. In Bozzano, it has been cooked for hundreds of years as the main event on August 24th.

The sagra is the grandest celebration of the simplest food, all under the light of God, eaten together, only in that village, only on that day, every year. If this is not dolce vita, I don’t know what it is.