Feast or Famine

Highlights and Hazards of Harvest Season

In the life of a farmer, harvest season is, literally and figuratively, “crunch time”. Across the countryside, monster machines roll in, headlamps glaring well into the night, as they thrash their way through the once tranquil fields, like dinosaurs rampaging across Jurassic Park.  These early weeks of autumn mark the culmination of a year’s effort and all hands are at work—picking, plucking, hauling, and, given the Italian love of gesture, lamenting— as the fruits of the earth are gathered once again.

For the record: I am not a farmer.

Not even of the gentlemanly sort. In fact, I’m barely a gardener. At our home in Italy, the only two crops we’ve been able to produce successfully in our heavy clay soil are olives and rocks (and some years the olives don’t happen).  As a New York City dweller for three decades, I have acquired a host of indispensable, if undefinable, social and intellectual skills, all of which are completely useless in a rural Italian town at this time of year.

Mr. October I am not. When it comes to harvest time in Italy, I am purely a spectator. And where better to admire the accomplishments of the nation’s farmers than the annual harvest festival, or sagra?

Taking its name from the Latin word for “sacred”, the sagra originated as a sacramental feast, although the idea of throwing an autumnal blowout certainly pre-dates the Church. As with most things in contemporary Italy, the sagra is now a happy if ungodly mix of ancient custom and crass commercialization. Sagre are the original block parties, held in piazzas  across the country. Most often, they celebrate a local food speciality.  In a society as food-obsessed as Italy, that means a lot of celebrating.

The sheer variety of sagre is staggering. In Lucca there’s a sagra for fish and potatoes; in Lombardia, they honor red onions; in Paestum, it’s artichokes. Just among the towns in our small corner of Le Marche, there are sagre for everything from frogs to vino cotto (cooked wine) to fried olives.

The town of Monteleone di Fermo near our home hosts a sagra for salmon, despite being situated almost 20 miles from the sea, and the Adriatic sea at that. As it turns out, the salmon at the center of the sagra is of the cured variety. This distinctly un-Italian delicacy is imported from Scandinavia by a local chef who married a Finnish girl working as the au pair for the town’s contessa. After re-locating for many years to Finland, Gianpaolo returned to Monteleone, without the wife, but bringing his smoked salmon with him. There’s a lot of story behind some of these sagre.

But even against such formidable competition, the generally acknowledged champion of the sagre in our neighborhood has always been the hermetic, hilltop village of Smerillo, which on one Sunday in October hosts the annual Castagnata (Chestnut Festival). When we purchased our Italian home almost 20 years ago,  it was the first local event we learned about, extolled by foreigners and natives alike. Determined as we were in those early days to fast-track our assimilation into this adopted community, we vowed to return that fall to experience the seminal event of the social calendar for ourselves.

We were not alone. Sagre in Italy are like Phish shows in America:  devotees don’t do just one; they load up the campervan and hit ‘em all. When we emerged that October morning  from Contrada Durano, an inn hidden in the woods below Smerillo, we could already see a processional of RVs, bikes, and motorcycles snaking their way up the backroad toward town. C and I , along with our friends Franco and Rosanna from Milan, decided to walk the forest path instead. We could use the mile-long climb to work up an appetite sufficient to the gluttony ahead.

Smerillo is sometimes referred to as the “balcony” of the Le Marche region, perched on a rocky ridge almost half a mile high, with equally stunning views of the Adriatic sea and the Sibillini Mountains. On that day— with the air apple-crisp, the green countryside blazed by reds and golds, and Franco in full Scottish tartan—it was autumn in a nutshell.

For a village where cats often outnumber people, it appeared the entire population of 300 had been pressed into action. The older women boiled pasta and stirred great black cauldrons of polenta; the older men captained the grill; teenagers cleared tables. If the roles were overly circumscribed, it was a matter more of habit than institutional bias. You don’t sense that a committee in Smerillo meets each year to discuss how to reinvent the Castagnata. That’s probably wise.

The crowds lining the  cobbled alleys seemed content with things exactly as they were. As at most sagre, there were long tables with plastic checkered tablecloths, craft booths,  an accordion-driven band playing it’s best oompah-pa-pa, and food tents that filled the sky with smoky promise. Grasping my meal ticket, I stepped up to the first counter at the Chestnut Festival and prepared to order.  Only when I read the menu card posted on the cart did it occur to me that I had a problem:

Wait. I’m allergic to nuts.

Seriously.

While my allergy is of a 20th century vintage rather than 21st, which means I won’t go into anaphylactic shock within 50 yards of a cashew, eating a chestnut-filled gnocchi would definitely guarantee a high-speed run to the hospital. I hesitated. The nonna serving gnocchi stared at me, confused. The line of people behind me murmured impatiently. C pulled me away before I could speak. Or start to cry.

“Skip it. Look at all these other stands,” she assured me. “Not everything is going to have chestnuts in it”.

Franco and Rosanna looked at one another with raised eyebrows.

There were indeed plenty of food stands. There was chestnut polenta, porchetta stuffed with chestnuts, and chestnut gelato. Even the craft tents featured beautiful, hand-crafted objects made of chestnut wood. A half-hour later, after inspecting nearly every vendor, I was still holding an untouched meal ticket.

Somehow it had never occurred to me that at the Chestnut Festival,  there would be nothing to eat but chestnuts.  I had travelled all the way from New York only to starve at a food fair . At the last tent, faced with the prospect of carrying an empty plastic plate to a long table full of sagra celebrants, my eye settled on what I decided, perhaps too rashly, would be the solution to my deprivation.

“I’ll take a grappa,” I said. Turning to C triumphantly, I added: “See? No nuts”.

For the uninitiated, grappa is Italian firewater often homemade by farmers from the leftovers of the wine-making process. At 50% alcohol content,  it is intended primarily to fuel rockets, or as a digestive after a meal.  It is not meant to be the meal.  A steady diet of grappa—say three or four over the course of a long afternoon— on an empty stomach could leave one decidedly… unsteady. I can vouch for this.

A few hours later,  weaving through the wilderness on the precarious path  back to Contrada Durano, I stumbled (surprise) over a rock. As I dusted off my pants and pride, Franco showed us what my foot had unearthed: a rock speckled with fossilized shells— prehistoric remnants from a time when Smerillo, the balcony of Le Marche, was beneath the Adriatic Sea.

Awed by my accidental trip into paleontology, I decided to keep the stone as a souvenir, a trophy to my personal harvest season. Today it sits on our mantle, one of the few things I’ve ever cultivated successfully.

By the time we arrived back at the inn, with me schlepping a rock the size and weight of a bowling ball, there was another couple standing at the bar.

“How did you enjoy the Castagnata ?” they inquired.

We assured them that the event had lived up to its vaunted reputation. Though my allergy had presented some challenges….

“What a terrible pity, to miss out on the whole point of the party,” the man said. “Perhaps you want to come with us next week—I think we’re headed to Abruzzo.” he offered, setting his guidebook down on the counter. “They’re doing the  “festa della grappa”.