Summer time: time for beers and festivals, parties and nights.

 

The word “diet”, even in its Italian translation “dieta”, immediately brings to mind images of strict  diets: low calorie dishes, basically unseasoned, often sad, and aimed to get you to maintain a healthy and ideal weight .. “ideal” according to standard the most often questionable, which often do not correspond to the physical characteristics of each person.

 In fact the word DIET, by δ?αιτας greek, means “way of life”: a conscious attitude towards food “a set of skills, knowledge, practices and traditions ranging from the landscape to the table, including the crops, harvesting, fishing, storage, processing, preparation and, in particular, the consumption of food.” UNESCO.IT

Traditions and food, fine wines and ancient villages: in other words the Italian festivals, that in summer cheer and enliven the warm evenings of the Italian peninsula, the mother of the “Mediterranean diet”. There is no town, village or even district that does not have its festival for good food, great wine and delicious beer.

Here below are listed a few, perhaps the most strange and curious.

 

Festival of Peirbuieira

This festival takes place in late August in Rocca Grimalda, a small village in the province of Alessandria, and the protagonist is Peirbuieira, a dish of ancient folk traditions whose recipe is totally secret and inimitable.

 

Festival of Tajarin cun l’Oca

Staying in Monferrato and more precisely to Murisengo, you can not miss the Festival of Tajarin cun l’Oca (goose.) As the name implies, is the goose to make her queen, cooked in different ways and accompanied by famous wines of Monferrato.

 

Festival of pipindune e ove at Collecorvino, in Pescara.

For those who do not speak the Abruzzo dialect, the pipindune e ove are nothing but the scrambled eggs with fried peppers, usually eaten as a snack mid-morning … broke the fast.

This simple and “poor” dish will welcome you with its unique taste, in the company of the best local

 

Festival of Vastedda fritta ( fried)

Moving decisively to the South of Italy, exactly to Gratteri, in the province of Palermo, in mid-August, you can take part in the festival “Vastedda fritta”

 The Vastedda is a paste made ??of flour, yeast, olive oil cut into rectangles, folded in half and fried, then is passed into sugar. Can also be salt: in this case, at the end of frying,  is passed in the salt, and it is served with anchovies placed at the center of the paste. The Vastedda is counted in the list of traditional products agroalimetari (PAT)

And finally, the Festival of Cazzata

A Casarano, in the province of Lecce, you can eat the “cazzata” that is nothing but the paste left over after the making of homemade bread.

This mixture is flatted, or to put it into the Salento dialect “cazzato”, and then seasoned in many different ways.

 

During the festivals also traditional drinks flow in liters and in recent years, in addition to the already well-known wines from the different Italian region, it is possible to taste wonderful craft beers, now produced throughout the whole Country.

In Italy each village has its own festival and it is impossible to mention them all: which one do you recommend?