Acquacotta soup festival

Original name: Sagra dell’Acquacotta

Place: Municipality of Santa Fiora, in Grosseto province, Monte Amiata area.

First year of the festival: 1981

Period: August

2023 scheduled on: from from Friday 11 to Sunday 20 August

Opening time: lunch and dinner, every day

Local specialties:

  • First courses: acquacotta, Maremma area soup; zuppa di funghi, mushrooms soup
  • Second courses: cinghiale alla cacciatora, wild boar stew

Every region, every place has some legendary dishes, well known and greatly renowned even outside the area where the dishes come from. One of this great recipes will be at your disposal in this sagra: the acquacotta. It’s a bread soup, with vegetables, eggs and pecorino cheese; but ingredients can vary from village to village in the large Maremma subregion, from the southern part of Tuscany to the north side of Latium, where this dish is prepared.

As many other Tuscan soups, acquacotta was a quintessential of what we now call the “poor cuisine”, the cucina povera; poor, because of the simplicity and the low economic value of its ingredients - and also because this was the cuisine of the workers, peasants, farmers, surely not rich people, back in the past centuries. The name itself of this recipe, acquacotta, recalls the mind something of extremely cheap and simple, in English it’s “cooked water”.

You’ll find other good traditional recipes here in Bagnolo, as the mushrooms soup and the wild boar stew; mushrooms and wild boars populate the dense forests around Santa Fiora village, which by the way it’s at 2600 ft. Don’t forget your pullover!

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