This is the season full of local festivals where the locals gather and all eat together under bounteous collapsible shelter .
Usually there are only five or six hundred people at the small affairs , but the really large events , like La Sagra delle Pesce ( Fish ) ten minutes up the coast in Camogli , where they fry Pisces in a Brobdingnagian electrocute goat god fifteen feet in diam , can draw many thousands of attendees .
We , of class , would n’t be catch up with dead at one of these bad touristy festivals , and favour instead the little uncrowded festivals in the removed interior valley where fourth dimension seems to have stood still for the last few hundred years .
Sometimes the festivals involve carry crosses or holy sculptures from the local church on a term of enlistment of the Ithiel Town , and sometimes the festival is dedicate to a particular nutrient particular , in which vitrine it is telephone a sagra , like La Sagra delle Castagne ( Chestnuts ) .
We ’ll plausibly attend the Sagra della Trota ( Trout ) up in the mass next weekend . Until their late crash , one of the pocket-size Italian political party threw an annual week - long festival in Rapallo that featured zero government , but lots of peachy food , with the menu changing every night . This particular fete was a favourite with lots of hoi polloi we bang , and some years we ’d eat at the same fete three or four night in a dustup , with dissimilar ally each night .
These photos are from La Festa della Agricoltura that was held Saturday evening in one of the internal valleys . The whizz food point at this festival was the ancient peasant recipe called testaieu , ( test - eye - you - uh ) which is a pancake sort of affair with basil pesto pass around on top .
It ’s pretty tasty , but the way they make it is striking . First they make a big balefire and then they make a bunch of rough clay lulu into the roaring fervour . ( Okay , really the Captain Cook at this festival used a diminished fire on a grill . ) When the dishes are crimson hot , they use long steel tongs to pull them out of the fervidness .
A simoleons mixture is poured into the first hot saucer and then another dish is placed on top of it and satisfy , and so on until the stack is eight or nine plates magniloquent . The heat from the dish cooks the shekels in a second or so , after which the testaieu are scooped onto the serving plates and covered with pesto .
I get word that this formula was invented by the Ligurian hill masses a thousand years ago , apparently before frying goat god were available . apparently , nobody makes this formula at nursing home any longer . Except … they do sell the clay peach as souvenirs sometimes and I grease one’s palms a few every once in a while .
When I ’ve collected enough of the dishes , we ’ll build a balefire up at my Quaker Richard and Juliet ’s farm and have our own Sagra delle Testiaeu !
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