Asti's Festival of Festivals

The Sunday event starts with a colourful parade that winds through the streets of the city, depicting rural values and traditions of the province with more than 3,000 characters in authentic period costumes.

The Festival delle Sagre features Italy's largest open-air restaurant, offering a variety of authentic Piedmont cuisine.

Both written and oral recipes created by generations of rural people are used each year to present a menu of over eighty different dishes, prepared using ingredients that are typical for the Asti region.

Some are unusual, such as rice with Barbera d'Asti, Polenta with wild boar stew, rabbit agnolotti, fried bleak (alborelle - a type of fish), farinata (belecauda in Asti dialect of the Piedmontese language) or bollitto with bagnetto verde.

On Sunday morning, a long procession files through the Asti streets, based on the theme of country life up to the early twentieth century.