The San Donnino Fair

October 9 is the feast day of San Donnino, the famously headless patron saint of Fidenza, and every year the town marks the occasion with a multi-day fair that Pam says is much bigger than the town's festivities at Christmas. 

What's a fair wihout balloons?

Starting on Thursday, October 4, streets all over the downtown began filling up with tents that for the next five days housed vendors selling everything from beer and ham and pizza to scarves and paintings and tablecloths. 

The saint himself, rendered on the street in colored sawdust as part of the festivities.

I got back to town on Saturday morning, and by then the party was in full swing. Day and night the streets were crammed with people, and loud pop music--including some Italian pop, and not just golden U.S. oldies--bounced off the buildings.

Anolini, the round filled pasta of this area, are the special food for this holiday, and cups of anolini in broth were on sale in several of the tents. A commemorative T-shirt for the fair shows a headless man holding a head-sized anolino in one hand and, instead of a martyr's palm, a slotted spoon.

This booth was right outside our front door. We got a cupful one evening, but they were underdone and over-salted. That's a shame, when you can get such good anolini at a lot of places around here.

One night a famous comedian, Gianpaolo Cantoni, stood in the center of Piazza Garibaldi and told jokes for an hour and a half.

Sometimes I was able to understand the set-up--there was the one about Jesus and a parrot, and one about the guy who wins three nights with Miss India, and a joke about the woman who grated Viagra into her husband's spaghetti con vongole--but when the punchline arrived I could never once grasp what everyone else was roaring with laughter about. All this time with my family, here and in New York, has not helped my Italian one bit.

Everywhere you turned there was food.

A display in a local shop.

For the occasion, the town installed raised beds full of fennel, celery, lettuces, tomatoes, and other vegetables, and big pots with olive and fruit trees all along a stretch of the main street. 

But that end of town had few tents and therefore less traffic. Things were livelier in the main squares, such as the one whose stalls were devoted to feeding "carnivores."

The smell in this area was divine.

There was also a lot of drink, both beer and wine, for 2 or 3 euros a glass. But I didn't see anyone who got sloppy.The crowds were noisy--though not as noisy as the amplified music--but very good-natured. Italians apparently know how to hold their liquor. Or maybe I didn't stay up late enough to see the worst of it.

In some ways it was reminiscent of a county fair in the States. On Monday and Tuesday, for example, they set up an exhibition space for cattle down by Ristorante Ugolini. The animals were shiny clean and beautifully groomed, like porn stars.

I saw one man carefully blow-drying a cow, but what really made me understand the effort that went into this was when one of the cows began to urinate. A minder leaped up and held a bucket to catch the flow. Now that is animal husbandry. 

A lot more than a drop in the bucket.

On another day Fidenza's mycological society put up an amazing display of fresh funghi, both edible and toxic, under a portico on one side of Piazza Garibaldi.

It turns out that those red mushrooms with the white spots that you always see in storybooks, usually with a gnome or fairy perched on top, are poisonous.

Yesterday, the saint's feast day, was also the last day of the fair. After five days of crowds and late-night noise we weren't sorry to see it wrap up, but I also felt an all too predictable twinge of regret for what I'd missed--the calf judging, for instance, the amusement park rides at the far end of town that we didn't find out about until the fair was almost over, some of the live music that I heard through our (closed) windows but was too lazy to go down and see. I wonder if I should have bought one of those anolini T-shirts. 

By late last night the street downstairs had cleared out, although the music continued in the piazza till after midnight. This morning most of the tents were gone.

As if on cue, tonight it seemed to get dark much earlier. The fair is over and now winter is coming on.