The forgotten fruits

A celebration of cultivars of the past

The Festival of Forgotten Fruits is an event held on the second and third weekends of October in the historic center of Casola Valsenio, in the province of Ravenna. The event was established in 1992 with the aim of enhancing and promoting the autumn fruits that were once an integral part of the peasant diet and are now largely forgotten. During the festival, local farms display and sell their products, including loquats, sorbs, azeruole, avellane, chestnuts, arbutus, dogwoods and many others. In addition to the sale of products, the festival also features a series of side events, such as educational workshops, tastings, performances and concerts. The Forgotten Fruits Festival is a unique opportunity to discover the forgotten flavors of Romagna. Visitors can taste genuine and traditional products made with simple and wholesome ingredients. The event is also an opportunity to learn about the history and culture of rural Romagna, once based on the cultivation of these fruits.

Tradition and the recovery of old-fashioned fruits meet every year in Casola Valsenio on the third weekend of October for the Festival of Forgotten Fruits. It is a market that echoes a vanished world, which the Casola festival also echoes in the decorations of the stalls or in the reconstructions of rural life.

With the collaboration of local farmers, interested in the recovery of forgotten plants, the festival becomes a showcase with an ancient flavor, where you can also find all the typical local products of the season: apples, mushrooms, wine, chestnuts, truffles, honey, preserves and delicious jams prepared by hand. For the latter, a contest open to all was even devised for the best jam made from forgotten fruits.

Forgotten fruits are at home in the kitchens of many Casolan restaurants. Recipes based on these fruits include the bramble and mulberry sauce, the carnelian and quince compotes, the jujubes savor, the wild apple pie and desserts starring the broccoline pears and those foxglove, with chestnuts, alkermes, wine and cheese.

During the Festival in the menus appear the risotto of volpine pears, the roast pork loin with chestnuts and raspberries or the veal roll with pomegranate, the autumn desserts with forgotten fruits, the jam tart of rowan, plums or sloes stuffed with walnuts and zabaglione, the sorbet with carnelians. Names and flavors that bring to mind dormant memories and well known to our grandmothers, who from these wild fruits or cultivated in marginal areas knew how to obtain tasty dishes and excellent jams.

Fruits of those that were collected directly from the plant, in the garden behind the house or, better yet, in the woods around. Flavors of childhood, for a while forgotten but saved from extinction thanks to the desire to recover everything that is linked to the traditions of a certain territory.