The Sagra, or How to Eat Your Way Around an Italian Village

There is a sign by the side of a small road in Umbria, propped against a tree, hand-painted, slightly crooked, and unmistakably municipal. It says: SAGRA DELLA LUMACA — 4, 5, 6 LUGLIO. There is an arrow pointing left, into a village I have not heard of, and underneath, in smaller letters, the helpful clarification: Sagra of the Snail.

A sagra of the snail

You can drive past this sign. Many people do. Or you can turn left, follow the arrow up a hill, past a vineyard and a small shrine to the Madonna, and arrive, twenty minutes later, in a village of perhaps three hundred people, which has set up trestle tables under the plane trees of its central piazza, strung the bunting between the lamp-posts, hired a four-piece band that will later play Romagna Mia with a kind of grim regional pride, and which is about to feed you, for approximately fourteen euros, a four-course meal in which every single course features the snail.

The sagra is the most underrated institution in Italian cultural life. Every village has one. Often several. They are not for tourists. They are not in the guidebooks. They will not appear in any list of Things to Do in Tuscany. But between roughly the middle of June and the middle of September, every weekend, in every region of Italy, there is a sagra somewhere within driving distance, and if you know how to find them and how to behave once you have arrived, they are one of the great unsung pleasures of European travel.

The sagra is, by tradition, a celebration of a single ingredient

This is the structural rule. Not a celebration of regional cooking in general; not a full blown wine festival; not a food fair. A sagra is built around one thing: the porcini mushroom, the wild boar, the chestnut, the snail, the polenta, the truffle, the chickpea, the fava bean, the frog, the eel, the gnocco fritto, the cinghiale, the lumaca, the rana, the asparago, the carciofo, the fragola. Whatever the village grows, hunts, fishes, forages or has historically been associated with, you will find a sagra dedicated to it, and across an entire weekend the entire menu will be variations on that one theme.

The Sagra della Lumaca will feed you snails braised in tomato, snails with chilli, snails in pasta sauce, snails with polenta, and, by the end, a small ceremonial snail-shaped biscuit. The Sagra del Cinghiale will offer wild boar pappardelle, wild boar stew, wild boar salami, wild boar sausage, wild boar with chestnuts, and a small grappa to recover from the wild boar. The Sagra della Rana — the frog sagra, in the rice-paddy country between Vercelli and Pavia — will offer fried frogs, frog risotto, frog soup, frogs in a sort of vinegar-and-onion carpione, and a panna cotta that, mercifully, contains no frog.

The principle is admirable and slightly mad. It implies a confidence in the chosen ingredient that a more cautious culture would never permit. You can spend an entire weekend eating snails. You can spend an entire weekend eating frogs. The villagers will not get tired of either. Why should you?

The word itself is older than it looks. Sagra comes from the Latin sacrum, meaning a sacred thing, and the original sagra was the village patron saint's feast — the day, once a year, when the church door was thrown open, the relics were paraded around, the wine flowed, and the whole community ate together on long tables in the square. The food was whatever was in season and whatever the village specialised in: in some places lamb, in some places chestnuts, in some places the fish from the local lake. Over centuries the religious part has gradually thinned out and the food part has gradually thickened, until in many villages today the patron saint has been quietly retired and only the eating remains.

You can still see the older shape in some places. The Sagra di San Giovanni in a small town in Lazio will involve, in this order: a mass at six in the evening, a procession with the saint's statue and a brass band, a brief fireworks display, and then, immediately afterwards, the trestle tables and the snails. The line of continuity is short and pragmatic. The saint is honoured. The village eats.

The mechanics of a proper sagra are remarkably consistent across Italy

You arrive in the late afternoon and park on a verge somewhere because the village itself is too small to absorb the number of cars. You walk into the centre. There is a cassa — a cash desk — staffed by two retired men with metal cashboxes, where you pay for your meal in advance and receive a numbered ticket with the courses printed on it. You take your ticket to the trestle tables, where you sit on a plastic chair next to people from the next village along, who are talking about somebody else's vineyard. A teenager appears with the antipasto. Then another teenager with the primo. Then another with the secondo. Then a small bottle of red wine arrives in a way that has not been explained but does not need to be. Somewhere across the piazza a four-piece band — accordion, guitar, drums, and an electric organ — is tuning up for the dancing that will start at about ten o'clock, and which the older couples in the village have been quietly waiting for since approximately April.

By eleven the children are running between the tables in a controlled chaos. By midnight the singer is doing Volare and the dancing has spread into the side streets. By one in the morning there is grappa. By two it is over, and the village reabsorbs itself, and the trestle tables are folded away by a small army of teenagers who will be on the cash desk themselves in thirty years.

The food at a sagra is not, in any complicated sense, gourmet. The pasta is not made by an artisan. The wine has come in a five-litre demijohn from the cooperative. The plates are paper. The cutlery is plastic. You will not see your dinner garnished, plated, or photographed at any point. The cooking is overseen by the Pro Loco, the local volunteer association, and the actual labour is done by an assortment of grandmothers, retired plumbers, off-duty schoolteachers, and the village's slightly intense food obsessive who has been thinking about this weekend since March.

This is, of course, exactly the point. The sagra is the place where Italian food is still domestic, where the recipes belong to specific grandmothers, and the variations between villages are real variations and not the inventions of a marketing department. The Sagra del Tortello in one Emilian village will produce a different tortello to the Sagra del Tortello in the next village along, and both will be quietly convinced that theirs is correct. The differences are precise and not negotiable.

There is a Sagra della Polenta near Bergamo where they cook the polenta in a single enormous copper pot over a wood fire in the piazza, stirred with what is, essentially, an oar. There is a Sagra del Pesce in a small town on the Adriatic where they have, since 1937, fried the day's catch in the world's largest portable frying pan — a circular thing nearly four metres across that has its own dedicated transport vehicle. There is, in Vinci, the village in which Leonardo was born, a Sagra dell'Uccellino — a sagra of the small bird — which is exactly what it sounds like and which I will not describe further out of respect for those readers who would prefer not to know.

How do you find one? This is the slight art of the thing

The sagre are not, on the whole, advertised online. There is no consolidated calendar. The signs by the side of the road are the original and still most reliable marketing channel: the hand-painted SAGRA DELLA something with an arrow and a date. The notice in the window of the small village bar. The mention from the woman in the forno who is wrapping your bread. The Pro Loco poster taped to the door of the church. The handwritten flyer at the campsite reception.

There are now a few websites — sagreinitalia.com is the main one, regional tourist boards sometimes list them — but the better way is still simply to drive through rural Italy in July and August and follow signs. You will not run out of options. There are estimated to be something between two and three thousand sagre in Italy in any given summer. You can spend an entire holiday going to one a day, and you will still have only scratched the surface, and you will not have eaten in a single restaurant.

I will, I think, always prefer this kind of eating to the better-known kind. The Michelin-starred dinner in the converted monastery is a beautiful thing, in its way, and on the right occasion entirely justified. But it does not tell you very much about a place. It tells you about a chef. The sagra, by contrast, is the place where a particular village announces what it is and what it grows and what it has always eaten, and invites you to sit down on a plastic chair and eat it with them.

There is a small village in the Marche where, every year on the second weekend of July, they hold the Sagra della Crescia sul Panaro — a sagra of a flat unleavened bread, cooked on a hot stone, served with whatever the village happens to have that day. There is nothing very famous about the village. Nothing very famous about the crescia. There is no historical claim of significance. There are simply three hundred people who have been making this bread for several hundred years and who would like, for one weekend a year, to feed it to anybody who turns up.

If you find such a place — and you will, if you turn left at the sign — accept the offer. Sit down. Pay the man at the cash desk. Eat what is put in front of you. Stay for the dancing.

The sagra is not the food. The sagra is the village showing you, for one weekend in July, what it is for.