A Recipe for Disaster (# 5)

Food and Fame in the Italian countryside

Stephen Phelps
Aug 26, 2017 · 4 min read

But today I am not in the Italian countryside (sadly). I am in chilly London, a long way from the blistering heatwave in central Italy. Just a short trip, but already I am missing the pleasures of August in Sarnano. Each year our little town lays on a special event called Castrum Sarnani…. il medioevo che ritorna.

It’s always a lovely occasion, when the medieval streets of the centro storico take on a whole new life. Tented camps spring up in the little squares where we usually park our cars.

The gateways and alleys are suddenly thronged with men and women in medieval dress, cantinas open up as ancient shops and workshops, where people who look incredibly at home in their colorful costumes are producing wool, candles or soap using the ancient methods. My own favorite is the blacksmith who turns up every year, his vast bellows powering the roaring flames of the forge. This year there was a falconer. If you look at the picture (above) of the Castrum Sarnani sign you can see his hawk perched on top of it waiting to swoop down to his waiting arm.

There are ordinary people there too, of course. The object of the exercise is to attract crowds of holidaymakers, and this year it’s part of the rinascimento of the region following the earthquakes which started more or less exactly a year ago. Sadly there are parts of the town that have been judged unsafe to use for Castrum, but it just means that new bits are being put to use, like via Roma where you could sit and dine al fresco alongside the 12th century portico. Not inside you notice, because that too is propped up with great wooden supports in case there’s another shake.

The Castrum bit of the title is interesting. It refers to the way towns like Sarnano were built in the middle ages when they had to be able to protect themselves from invading armies, and sometimes from the town next door.

It’s all celebrated in Castrum Sarnani with squads of men marching about in medieval armor, and recreations of their camps, complete with weapons stash.

In my book A Recipe for Disaster, I write quite a bit about the history of Sarnano, and just as a taster, here’s the bit about the castrum principle — how it works and what it’s for:

From the moment I first walked under the Brunforte arch and into the centro storico I had been fascinated by the history of this little town. I had learned about its founding in 1265, about how St Francis of Assisi had visited the area some forty years earlier during his travels across Italy, and how the town had been built on the castrum principle to protect itself against invaders. I also began to understand just a little of how a small medieval town like this might have worked. In the middle ages there were the same number of inhabitants as there are now, but all crammed into the tiny centro storico instead of spread out in the new development which has grown up around the old town in recent decades. I learned how taxes were based on the number of chimneys in operation on a dwelling. And how flour produced in the watermills of the surrounding countryside would be brought to the Porta di Pesa, the “Weighing Gate”, to be stored in a communal granary (now re-purposed as the local cinema — where else can you find a seven hundred year old cinema?). But then, in thinking about the relationship between the town, with its tight little streets running between rows of
tall houses joined in a single unbroken run, and the countryside, where everything would have been grown before being brought to market in town, I began to ask myself why would they have had allotments? Who would have wanted a vegetable garden in 1265? And then I read about the earthquakes.

And that’s when I go on to explain how the three rows of allotments under the window of our house were once upon a time houses themselves - until they collapsed in an earthquake several hundred years ago. But that, of course, is a whole new story!

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Stephen Phelps

Written by

Author and TV Producer/Director living in Italy’s hidden gem, Le Marche, a land of fabulous food and devastating earthquakes. (www.cookucina.com)

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