2023-08-04 09:10:05
Announced from colored posters posted throughout the valley, this year too the well-known San Martino in Gattara (RA) takes Hill and wild boar festival. We are in the Lamone Valley, where Romagna gives one final blow before becoming Tuscany, and this can be understood not only from the landscape and the language, but also from the cuisine made of mestizo flavors and hill products. Like wild boar meat and fresh pasta, protagonists since 1988 of the festival held in this village of three hundred inhabitants along the road that connects Faenza to Florence. Families, groups of friends, emigrants from San Martino who return for the occasion and vacationers, look around to recognize and greet each other as they queue up at the entrance for a seat at the shared tables that are meters long. Once seated, they can order the dishes from the menu printed on the paper napkin that indicates the specialities: croutons from the hills (with livers and mushrooms), cappelletti, tortelli and tagliatelle with wild boar sauce, jugged wild boar with polenta, bean stew with sausages (of wild boar, of course), mutton, stuffed sweet peaches, grandmother’s tart.
I choose cappelletti with wild boar ragout, stew, ham bruschetta and white wine (bottled). While waiting for the dishes to arrive, I take a peek into the kitchens (which are “on sight”) where I find Signora Giovanna busy draining the tortelli. She tells me that she has been participating as a volunteer for more than thirty years and before her in her place was her mother Elide – an expert cook – from whom she inherited the job of filling pasta.
In the years, the festival has become the most important moment of the summer (after all, the word festival derives from “sacred”, i.e. sacred festival!) and keeps the inhabitants of San Martino engaged in a social promotion association, involved (adults and children) in various jobs: cooks, waiters, bartenders, dishwashers, cashiers, cleaners. For two weekends, the last in July and the first in August, the village is enlivened by the festival but the intense preparation activity begins much earlier. From the end of April, three evenings a week, Giovanna and the other volunteers meet to prepare cappelletti and tortelli: the men knead the eggs and flour, the women roll out the dough and close the cappelletti by hand, one by one. It is certainly a way to entertain oneself in a country where meeting and recreation opportunities must be built and defended but, between one chat and another, they have prepared four quintals of cappelletti and the same number of tortelli filled with ricotta and spinach. Tagliatelle, on the other hand, are rolled out with a rolling pin and prepared shortly before being served. “Today we made 300 tagliatelle eggs”, she explains to me. It is a unit of measurement from Romagna: if we consider that for the traditional recipe for puff pastry 100 grams of flour are needed for each egg, and we calculate about one egg per person, the count is easily done. Yes, because people have always gone to the San Martino in Gattara festival to taste wild boar meat (prince of these thick woods that cover the valley – it seems that the name “Gattara” derives from the ancient Celtic word gat, which means wood), but above all for the fresh pasta still made “as it once was”.
August festivals to experience Italy in the tradition of Lorenzo Cresci 29 July 2023
For all this work many hands are needed and there are about a hundred volunteers, of all ages, and each with a defined task that changes over time according to a precise progress (you start by clearing the tables, and your career progresses), until you become experts of your own role, which is interpreted every year with love and passion. And everyone’s contribution is essential for the success of the event, especially in times of greatest attendance when work becomes intense and fast. “Each time at the end of the festival we are very tired – says Signora Giovanna – but it is a tiredness that we immediately forget because the following year we start again with more impetus and enthusiasm than before. Being together means laughing and joking, and it’s an antidote to the death of small towns like this”. Excluding the expenses, for raw materials, the fittings, the bills and all the rest, the earnings of the festival are invested every year in works in favor of the town, such as for example the renovation of the premises of the parish club, by now the only center of aggregation left. I go back to my seat where in the meantime the first courses have arrived, in a second round the waiter will bring the rest of the order. The cappelletti with wild boar sauce, small and firm, did not disappoint my expectations and actually have the flavour, appearance and callous texture of a comforting dish which, as far as I’m concerned, “tastes like home”. One can feel the care that Giovanna and her colleagues have employed in preparing them. In its delicious simplicity, the bruschetta of bland Tuscan bread dressed with olive oil and enriched with excellent ham introduces me to the powerful and tasty stew of beans and wild boar sausages. I conclude with cream-filled peaches which are an emblematic dessert of Romagna (but also a bit of Tuscany).
Who goes to festivals like this one, it finds what it is looking for: tradition, yes, but dishes and products that are a symbol of identity, belonging and even a little nostalgia. Ample parking, live music, a dance floor (which, alas, has disappeared here after Covid), plastic chairs and stalls are consolidated ingredients that are more or less common to all festivals. But in particular, the festival in San Martino is renowned for the quality of the food and the cohesion of the volunteers who continue to close the cappelletti and make the tagliatelle with a rolling pin. Its longevity is the litmus test of good food and a good experience. It has always been held in the sports field of the town, a space large enough to accommodate the thousands of people who go to the hills for two weekends, for the beautiful cool evening and the abundant portions. In addition to San Martino, which will conclude its festival on Sunday 6 August, there is also Crespino Sul Lamone (FI), the same valley but already in Tuscany, which celebrates the Fried Piadina Festival (6 August). While the “Alto Rabbi wild boars” meet for the wild boar festival in Premilcuore (FC) from 4 to 6 August and, again there, on 13 August the Tortello alla Lasta festival is celebrated. In Montecoronaro (FC), in the same Apennines but in another valley, there is instead the Acquacotta Festival (August 5 and 6), a poor and delicious dish.
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