When does a local food festival become a cultural festival? Reframing the Sagra as Community Device in Contemporary Italy

This article interrogates the boundaries of the category “cultural festival” by critically examining the position of sagre, Italian local food festivals, within contemporary cultural and policy discourses. Despite their centrality in the Italian public sphere, sagre are often excluded from institutional definitions of cultural festivals, largely due to their emphasis on food, popular tradition, and informality. Drawing from anthropological theory and applied fieldwork, the article challenges this exclusion by proposing a more inclusive, relational conception of culture. Through the case study of the “Festa del Ringraziamento” (“Thanksgiving Festival”) of Voghera, a mid-sized town in Northern Italy, the article illustrates how a local food event can become a cultural device: a dynamic configuration of practices, narratives, and relationships that generate meaning, foster belonging, and support local development. The Voghera festival demonstrates how food, rather than a hedonistic distraction, can operate as a medium for storytelling, community-building, and territorial re-signification. It activates affective economies, enables intergenerational exchange, and creates a space of civic aggregation in a context marked by economic decline and social fragmentation. The article concludes by advocating for a redefinition of cultural festivals that recognizes the value of popular, food-based events as legitimate forms of cultural production. While grounded in a single case, the analysis opens broader questions for cultural policy, tourism, and the anthropology of heritage in post-industrial rural Europe.