Phaseolus
vulgaris to you, you
peasant, and you might also say “just” about a
strawberry, a chestnut, a truffle, a squid and any
other food that crops up (touché!) at
the many sagre in Italy held throughout the
year. These are local festivals held in countless
villages and towns, often dedicated to a local food.
Townsfolk put on traditional costumes, dance and
sing, and then, depending on location and time of
year, binge on olive oil, wine, pasta, chestnuts,
cheese, onions, eggplant, bread, pumpkin, more wine,
etc. The list is much longer than that. (I remind
you that "just a..." should really be "still a...",
much like "a kiss" and "a sigh" in As Time Goes
By. Unbelievably, some people still/just sing
it wrong!)
There are various ways of
looking at the sagra (plural: sagre).
First, it's a great way to try local specialties and
see authentic (or, at least, revitalized) tradition.
The best sagre do a good job of appealing to
tourists (increasingly important these days) and
showing off their traditional foodstuffs as
authentically as possible. You have to be careful,
though. There are festivals that are not all that
old and have been hammered together just to make
money; thus, if you find a sagra that brags
that it goes all the way back to, well not the 12th
century, but, say, 2006, and where the specialty is
individually wrapped cheese slices, keep looking.
Although it is common to find sagre that
have lapsed for many years, it is also common to
find them being revived. That's a good sign and
bespeaks healthy resistance to mindless acceptance
of globalization.
Second, you can view them
historically and socially. The word sagra
is, indeed, related to “sacred”; in Greek and Roman
times the festivals were originally religious
rituals to give thanks, among other things, for a
good harvest. In ancient times, the sagre
were performed in temples, and even today there is
often participation by local churches and clergy;
indeed, many sagre are timed to coincide
with the feast day of the patron saint of a
particular place. On another level, some
sociologists speak of the sense of social
aggregation and cohesion that a sagra
represents for smaller communities. I am too much of
a city-slicker to be able to judge, but I take
seriously such claims as “festivals can function as
a safety valve for communities...sustain a society's
equilibrium and secure solidarity among its
members...[and] ensure social unity in spite of
social conflicts and competing social norms and
values.”1 I take this to mean that
an occasional food fight breaks out.
If,
however, you're just in it for the food, there is a
lot to choose from. In the Campania region alone (of
which Naples is the capital) I stopped counting at
about 70 sagre. Among them: Eboli has a sagra
called “Brace lenta” (slow grill) featuring
traditional meats; Avellino a hazelnut sagra;
chestnuts in Caserta and Benevento; eggplant at
Preazzano di Vico Equense; mushrooms in San Giuseppe
Vesuviano; and, strangely, beer in Pompeii. I
mentioned “beans” because I walked in on
preparations for the great bean sagra in Controne, a
delightful little town on the southwestern corner of
the Alburni massif in the
Cilento area south of Salerno. The sagra,
itself, is at the end of November. Not surprisingly,
the preparations entail harvesting beans and then
eating some; the costumes and
sociological/historical stuff come later. I happened
upon a young woman in the fields rejoicing and
bringing in the sheaves. I reminded her that beans
come in pods not sheaves and if she had ever seen Invasion
of the Body Snatchers she would know that one
must be very careful around pods. She looked into my
heart and said, "Yes, but a bean is still a bean."
1. Referenced
in Celebrating Community and Cuisine: Tradition and
Change in the Sagre Festival in Italy by Di Maria Teresa Fiumerodo,
2008ProQuest LLC, UMI Microfilm 3302578.