Know the valley Casentino, Arezzo, Italy
Food, and what a sagra actually is
The valley cooks for itself first. You are simply welcome at the table.
You can eat very well in the Casentino without ever entering a restaurant. The valley’s real kitchen is a tent behind a church in August, run by twenty volunteers who have been doing this since they were children. It is called a sagra, there are dozens every year, and this page is how to walk into one as though you had been before.
What a sagra actually is
A sagra is a village food festival. Not a fair, and not a restaurant: a parish or a pro loco decides that this weekend the village will cook one thing, very well, several hundred times over, and that everyone will eat it at long shared tables. Whatever is left once the ingredients are paid for mends the church roof, or buys the youth team a set of shirts.
It is the cheapest good meal in the valley and, more to the point, the least performed one. Nobody is putting on a show for visitors, because until fairly recently there were not any.
What you will actually eat
- Tortelli di patate The valley dish. Pasta parcels filled with potato, garlic and parsley, dressed with meat ragu or simply butter and sage. Every family insists theirs are different, and every family is right.
- Tortello alla lastra From Corezzo, up towards La Verna: a thin square of dough filled with potato or greens, cooked on a slab of hot stone. Watch it being made. The stone is the whole point.
- Acquacotta Water, stale bread, onion, tomato, an egg broken in at the end. Poverty food that turned out better than the food it was standing in for.
- Scottiglia Five or six meats stewed slowly with wine and tomato, poured over toasted bread. Sunday food, and the reason Sunday exists.
- Castagnaccio Baldino, if you are local. Chestnut flour, water, oil, rosemary, pine nuts. Dense and barely sweet: an acquired taste, usually acquired on the second slice.
- Grigio del Casentino The valley’s grey pig, brought back from the edge of extinction. You will meet it as salami, as prosciutto, and as a very good reason to buy lunch from a butcher.
- Chestnuts, in every form Flour, necci, sweet polenta, roasted over the fire in October. The chestnut fed this valley for centuries, and the valley has not forgotten it.
How a sagra works, in practice
- Pay first There is a cassa: a table, a cash box, and somebody who has been running it for thirty years. You order and pay there, take the ticket, and hand it in at the kitchen window.
- Bring cash Many take cards now. Some do not, and in a mountain village the signal is more of a rumour than a fact.
- Come early, or come late The queue at eight on a Saturday is long. At seven, or at nine, it is not.
- Sit anywhere The tables are long and shared. That is not a compromise, it is the point.
- Small sagre move Rain shifts them, and the announcement goes up on a poster in the bar, not on the internet. Check before you drive up a mountain.
Sagre coming up
Here is what is in the calendar, in the order it happens. Turn up hungry.
- Pork shank, beer and Manhattan night
- Grilled-steak feast
- Tortelli food festival
- Tortelli Festival, Papiano
- Apericiccia Summer Aperitif-Dinner
- Fish dishes festival
A sagra is run by volunteers and priced by people who expect to see you again next year. That is why it costs what it costs.