Jaffe

Italy in August - Part 1: Sagra

Arrived back in the States last Sunday after an amazing week with Serena and her family in Salerno and the surrounding area. I'm still working on getting the pictures up, but in the meantime I thought I would post some of the highlights of the trip. Here's the first chapter, about my sagra experience.

A sagra is a local festival with food that is often centered around a particular ingredient or item. During one of the evenings, we went to a couple of the sagre around Salerno. The first one was a little on the quiet side, but the second one - Festa del Boscaiolo - was exactly what I had imagined from Serena's description of a sagra. Boscaiolo means woodsman, so the food at this sagra was centered around things you can find in a forest. It was in a small town called Calvanico, and when Serena and I arrived with her brother Antonio and his girlfriend Silvana, we were met by a crowd of people walking among the stands for the wine (gratis), pasta, or panini. We bought tickets to try the 'Penne alla Boscaiola' and the 'Panino do' Cravunaro (patate e funghi)', grabbed a glass (plastic cup, actually) of wine and settled into the food lines. While we ate, we listened to a band playing folk music, and watched a couple of little kids dance like they were at a Grateful Dead concert. Maybe they had too much of the free wine...

Labels: food, Italy, summer, travel, vacation

posted by Aron @ 2:08 PM