Ferragosto, or the Day Italy Closes

The centre of Bologna at nine in the morning on the fifteenth of August is one of the strangest places in  Europe. The porticoes, which normally funnel a continuous river of people under their arches, are empty. The shops are shuttered — not the ordinary evening shutter but the deep aluminium roller kind, pulled all the way down and padlocked, with a handwritten sign taped to the middle: chiuso per ferie, closed for the holidays, back on the 25th. The famous food shops of the Quadrilatero, the ones with the hanging mortadella and the towers of parmesan, are dark. A single bar is open somewhere near the station, staffed by a man who has clearly drawn the short straw, and a small population of the bewildered — tourists, mostly, plus a few locals who forgot to buy bread — drifts toward it like survivors toward a lighthouse.

The city has not been evacuated. It has done something more deliberate than that. It has, by near-unanimous private decision, simply stopped.

This is Ferragosto, the great full stop in the middle of the Italian year, and to understand Italy at all you have to understand that this is a holiday defined not by what people do but by what they conspicuously refuse to do. On the fifteenth of August, the entire country agrees to be somewhere else.

Where they have gone is not mysterious. They are at the sea, or in the mountains, or in the village their family came from, and they are eating an enormous lunch outdoors with a number of relatives that would, in any other month, constitute an imposition. The cities empty because everyone in them has driven, en masse, to a coastline that on this one day holds what feels like the entire population of the peninsula, arranged umbrella to umbrella in a solid mosaic of towels, cool boxes, and portable grills. The autostrade out of the cities on the days around the 15th carry some of the heaviest traffic of the year. The radio broadcasts the bollino nero — the black-dot days, the worst for jams — and everyone sits in the queue anyway, because the alternative is to be in the city, and on Ferragosto the city is precisely the thing one leaves.

The name gives away how old the impulse is. Ferragosto is a worn-down form of feriae Augusti — the holidays of Augustus — and it refers, with remarkable directness across two thousand years, to a rest period instituted by the Emperor Augustus in 18 BC. The original feriae Augusti were not a single day but a stretch of the whole month, a period of rest that followed the most punishing agricultural labour of the year: the grain was in, the fields were exhausted, the heat was at its worst, and the sensible thing to do was very little. Augustus, with the political instinct that kept him in power for four decades, formalised the instinct into a public holiday and attached his own name to it. Draft animals were released from work and decorated. There were races. People visited one another and exchanged good wishes and, one assumes, ate.

The Catholic Church, as it did with so much of the older calendar, later laid its own feast over the top. The fifteenth of August is the Feast of the Assumption of the Virgin — the day marking Mary's bodily assumption into heaven — and it is a holy day of obligation across the Catholic world, with processions and Masses and, in coastal towns, the blessing of boats and the carrying of the Madonna down to the water. The two layers, the imperial rest-day and the Marian feast, have coexisted so long that no one now experiences them as separate. You can go to Mass in the morning and grill sausages in the afternoon and feel no contradiction whatsoever, because there is none: the day has been about the pause after the harvest since long before either the Virgin or the Emperor were available to explain it.

There is a more recent layer, too, and it is the one that produced the specific shape of the modern holiday. In the 1920s and 30s, the Fascist regime introduced the treni popolari di Ferragosto — cheap special excursion trains that ran on and around the 15th, offering discounted fares to let ordinary working families reach the coast or the mountains for the day. It was, in the deliberate way of such things, a piece of social choreography: a state-sponsored day out for people who could not otherwise have afforded one. But it worked, and it stuck, and it is essentially the reason that Ferragosto today is a mass movement to the sea rather than a quiet religious observance. The idea that on this particular day one physically travels to the water, and that the whole country does so at once, is less than a century old, grafted onto a root two millennia deep. Italy is like this. The layers do not replace each other; they accumulate.

And so to the food, which — in a holiday ostensibly dedicated to doing nothing — turns out to require a surprising amount of doing.

The governing principle of the Ferragosto meal is that it should be eaten outdoors and should not, if possible, involve standing over a hot stove while the temperature outside touches thirty-five degrees. This produces two strategies. The first is the grigliata: the barbecue, conducted on the beach or in a mountain clearing or in the cortile of the village house, an affair of sausages, braciole, marinated chicken, vegetables blackened over charcoal, and the particular smell of grilled meat that hangs over the entire Italian coastline on the afternoon of the 15th like a national weather system. The second strategy is the food made in advance and eaten cold — above all pasta fredda, the cold pasta salad that every family produces in a vast bowl and carries to the beach: short pasta, tomatoes, mozzarella, olives, capers, basil, tuna, whatever the household version demands, dressed in the morning and left to come together in the cool box while everyone swims.

The regional specificities are worth knowing. In Rome, the traditional Ferragosto dish is pollo coi peperoni — chicken braised with sweet peppers and tomato — a dish that can be made the day before and, crucially, tastes better for the wait, which is exactly the quality a Ferragosto dish requires. It sits, it improves, it is eaten at room temperature under a tree while the cook, for once, does no last-minute work at all. In Sicily the day closes with gelu di muluni, the extraordinary Palermitan watermelon pudding — watermelon juice set with a little starch, scented with jasmine or cinnamon, studded with chocolate and candied pumpkin, served very cold. It is one of the great hot-weather desserts of Europe and it exists precisely because Sicily in August is a place where the only reasonable ambition is to eat something cold and red and be still.

And everywhere, at the end, there is watermelon itself — anguria in the north, cocomero in the centre, muluni in Sicily — hauled to the beach whole, kept cold in the sea or the cool box, split with a great deal of ceremony and juice, and eaten in dripping wedges as the afternoon tips over into its hottest, sleepiest hour. There is no more Ferragosto image than a family around the ruins of a long lunch, everyone slightly sunburnt, a split watermelon in the middle of the table, the sea twenty metres away, and nobody with the slightest intention of moving for several hours.

It is not only an Italian day, though Italy owns it most completely. The fifteenth of August is a public holiday across most of Catholic Europe, and the Assumption anchors a dense cluster of celebrations. In Spain, la Asunción falls in the very middle of the fiestas patronales season, when town after town holds its patron saint's festival, and mid-August in Spain is one long overlapping sequence of processions, bulls, fireworks, open-air dinners and villages that do not sleep for a week. The specific Italian gesture — the coordinated national emptying, the drive to the sea, the chiuso per ferie on every shutter — is more particular to Italy. But the underlying shape is shared right around the northern Mediterranean: the middle of August is when the Catholic south pauses, and the pause is old, and it has always involved eating together outside.

By late afternoon in the empty city, something shifts. The light in Bologna at five o'clock on Ferragosto is thick and gold and horizontal, sliding under the porticoes at an angle that only appears this late in the summer. The heat loosens. The one open bar has acquired a small, companionable crowd of the left-behind — the shopkeeper who couldn't afford to close, a couple of tourists who have made their peace with it, an old man who has done Ferragosto in this city every year for eighty years and sees no reason to drive anywhere. There is a particular solidarity among the people who stay. The city belongs to them for a day, silent and enormous and entirely theirs.

And out on the coast, the long lunches are winding down into the torpor that is the real point of the whole thing — the doing of nothing, at last, with the harvest in and the year at its peak and the sea going flat and silver in the late light. Ferragosto is the hinge of the Italian summer. It is the top of the arc. Everyone knows, without quite saying it, that after the fifteenth the light begins to change, the evenings cool by a degree, the first talk of la ripresa — the return, the going-back — starts to circulate. The great emptying is also, quietly, a turning point: the moment the summer stops climbing and begins, imperceptibly, to descend toward September.

But that is for later. For this one afternoon, the whole country is either asleep under a tree with watermelon juice on its hands, or sitting in a silent golden city that belongs, for once, to no one but the few who stayed. Both, in their way, are doing exactly what Augustus prescribed two thousand years ago: after the labour, the rest. Everything closed, so that everyone might, for a single coordinated day, do nothing at all.