As a Tuscan, I’ve always had an advantage when it comes to food festivals: I’ve never needed anyone to explain them to me. They’ve always been there—next to the ARCI clubs, the community centers, and the parishes. After all, it’s hard to find a church tower in Tuscany that doesn’t host at least one festival capable of filling the town square for a few evenings each year. You grow up with the idea that, at some point during the summer, someone will set up a kitchen, pull out hundreds of tables, and start serving people.
Around here, it’s such a deeply rooted tradition that we often forget just how special it is. So this summer, despite the heat and my busy schedule, I returned to one of my favorite pastimes: going to festivals. It happened almost every weekend: the Brozzi Frog Festival, the Chiesanuova di Cascina Eel Festival, Cerbaia in Festa, and the Cascia Porcini Mushroom Festival, in the municipality of Reggello.
Four different places that show how these festivals aren’t just for picture-perfect villages, but also for the suburbs and the lesser-known countryside.
When we talk about festivals, we almost always end up conjuring up an idealized image: the village, the stone-paved square, the panoramic view. But it doesn’t work that way. They also exist where the landscape isn’t the one you see in tourist brochures. Brozzi, for example, is a neighborhood on the outskirts of Florence, along Via Pistoiese, where the Frog Festival is one of the area’s most defining events, because it tells a story that belongs to that territory: the plain, the waters, and a culinary tradition that would be hard to imagine today if it hadn’t been kept alive through occasions like this.
The same is true of Chiesanuova, in the Cascinese area, where eel isn’t just a gimmick to attract visitors, but the thread that holds a gastronomic heritage together. In Cerbaia, the menu changes every evening according to a distinctly Tuscan logic, centered on traditional dishes and seasonal ingredients. In Cascia, the porcini mushroom is almost a pretext: the festival is primarily about the town itself and the Pieve di San Pietro that overlooks the square.
In the end, you realize that the local specialty is important, but it isn’t the star of the show—the star is the long table.
Perhaps this is one of the most authentic forms of Italian cuisine. It’s not so much what ends up on the plate as the way that meal is shared. Long tables, or small garden tables, set side by side, where families, groups of friends, couples, solo diners, groups arriving on motorcycles, and the town’s elderly share dinner and the space. This is an atmosphere that a restaurant, by its very nature, struggles to replicate—and when it does, it often feels artificial.
That’s why I find the comparison that resurfaces from time to time—especially when it comes to prices—rather uninteresting. It’s true that food festivals generally cost less. But it would be reductive to explain everything in terms of the final bill. Behind it all lies a completely different model, built on volunteerism and community organizations, which in Tuscany continues to play an important role in civic life.
In these cases, cuisine is a tool through which a community renews itself and sustains its activities.
And it is perhaps here that these festivals reveal something about today’s Italy better than many sociological analyses. In the kitchens and around the tables, retirees and students mingle, professionals who put on an apron after work, young people having their first experience serving others, and volunteers who have been keeping that same festival going for forty years. There are families who have been coming for generations and families who have lived in Tuscany for only a few years; children and grandchildren of immigrants who, to everyone, are now simply the local kids from the town or neighborhood.
Some clear tables, some fry food, some take orders, and some carry trays. And at the tables, the scene is the same: children, teenagers, seniors, people with mild disabilities, groups of twenty-somethings, and couples in their eighties share the same space without anyone feeling the need to point it out. Inclusion at these festivals isn’t a project or a slogan—it’s a spontaneous practice.
There is, however, another aspect that strikes me every time. Food festivals are one of the few places where Italian cuisine continues to tell its own story without feeling the need to explain itself, justify itself, or pander to tastes and trends. No one introduces the dish; no one constructs a narrative. The frog is there because it’s always been eaten in those parts. The eel, too. The porcini mushroom makes an appearance when it’s in season. There’s no obsession with seeking a “social” identity.
It’s simply practiced. Perhaps this is what keeps drawing me back to the festivals, year after year.
Not the search for better or cheaper cuisine. Not even nostalgia, which, all things considered, I don’t feel. Rather, it’s the feeling that a very Italian way of coming together through food survives there. A way that doesn’t belong only to small towns or the countryside, but also extends to the suburbs, neighborhoods, and places that rarely feature in culinary stories.