How do Italians celebrate important events?
By joining together and feasting, logicamente.
In the Assisi hills, the Feast of Santa Anna on July 26th, is celebrated for 10 days with passione – and gusto.
Up in the hills – not far from Assisi – in an area called “Paradiso,” locals unite in an evening food festival, a sagra – not far from a small church dedicated to Sant’Anna. –
Volunters cook up many courses of rural goodness and young persons serve up the culinary specialties, all of them volunteers as well. The elderly clean up the tables: volunteeers, too. All ages thus join together in celebrating the Saint – as do the many diners filling up the tables:
Do note the tasty rural goodness being served up by these young volunteers:
I think that this young man perhaps served our table….
…as I recognized the first courses a couple of us had ordered. Cindie and Michelle split the taglierini al Paradiso, pasta strings with ground meats and mushrooms:
I
I had ordered the other dish on the tray: gnocchi al Sagrantino (potato dumplings with a sauce of that famous Umbria red wine, Sagrantino , and crispy pancetta (bacon) bits:
(I’d had my summer favorite antipasto, prosciutto e melone, prior):
Another order carried by a smiling young girl was not headed our way but the two meat dishes on the left of her tray were what Pino had ordered: stinco di maiale con patate (pork shin with potatoes):
After the dinner service – at about 10 pm – a live band performed and many headed to the dance floor for ballroom dancing until midnight or later. Children joined in, some dancing with parents or grandparents, some with each other, imitating the moves of the adults.
One of the primary festa organizers, Monia, has told me that the Festa di Santa Anna – as we know it today – started in 1994 but that historians tell us that festivities in honor of the Saint were celebrated in the area as early as the beginning of the 17th-century.
A rural banquet highlighted with music and dancing links all nowadays.
What a way to celebrate a saint.
Read more here – and enjoy the photos! – of the Festa di Sant’Anna
Read about our apartment guests enjoying this festa.
Click here to read about the enjoyment of other guests at this festa.
