Soul Food
Here in Northern Italy, for my girlfriend and me, these weeks are that period of the year when the fun starts: it’s time for Sagre! 🍖💃🕺
A “sagra” is a local festival, and each village or city has its own. Of course, it’s not an exclusively Italian tradition at all. Usually, you can find typical and local dishes instead of “average” street food like sandwiches. Or better, often you can find both.
Last weekend, we ate:
- Ravioli al plin (small meat ravioli closed in a particular way, “with the pinch”)
- Calamari fritti (fried squid rings), since we were less than an hour from the sea
- Friciula piemontese (a fried dough), a.k.a. Heaven on Earth. With a slice of pancetta between two friciule, you get the best sandwich ever. And a cholesterol extra dose.
- …Rane 🐸 Yes, fried frog legs! Here in Piedmont, they’re quite popular, but not everyone likes them.
To be honest, it was that the first time that we ate frogs, and they surprised us. The taste is something between chicken and fish… but obviously, they’re fried, so they’d be tasty in any case.
The best is when you visit a village you didn’t know before, and it’s beautiful! Or you just find nice glimpses like this church below, in the village of Merana. We have a simple rule: the tiniest is the village, the better is the sagra experience… and it has been true, until now.
What we seek in these experiences… is the experience itself. We don’t just go there to eat. We like meeting new people – better if elder people, with stories to tell from past years and events. This is one of my favorite places to ask about the lore of the regione: even if we are just a fistful of kilometers from home, the dialect changes, and so often do the traditions.
Sagre will go on until late Fall, and the specialities will slowly move towards mushrooms, and then chestnuts.
We are quite gluttons, and we like to spend almost every weekend moving around the area.
Our car is even called sagracar in such trips. 😎
+++
Autumn Into Summer 🎵
Last week, luckily, I had plenty of free time.1 I could focus again on Godsip Club, and I was able to browse my Obsidian vault to get quickly some information about the Midsummer solstice. If you are interested about bonfires 🔥 or in wheels 🛞, then check out this article: Midsommar.
I also changed the font to Merryweather (non-Google) because I am trying to distance myself from Google as much as possible, especially with the Fonts. Too many websites are using them in the worst way: in the CSS, they refer to an external stylesheet and the font is not even downloaded on the device…
But I’m getting too nerdy for this post, which was normal just a few paragraphs above. Better stop for now.
🎮 …nothing 😬
📖 Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges
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Ha, it’s strange to read this sentence after the week after 🔥 ↩︎
Here in Northern Italy, for my girlfriend and me, these weeks are that period of the year when the fun starts: it’s time for Sagre! 🍖💃🕺
A “sagra” is a local festival, and each village or city has its own. Of course, it’s not an exclusively Italian tradition at all. Usually, you can find typical and local dishes instead of “average” street food like sandwiches. Or better, often you can find both.