This summer, after 3 years in this beautiful country, I got the chance to spend 15th august a.k.a ferragosto the Italian way, in a charming village in the south of Italy. Every year on this day, Ferragosto is celebrated with much gusto, featuring day trips, picnics, barbecues, concerts, festivals, and beach bonfires with family and friends.
The evening often concludes with lively music, dancing and spectacular fireworks. This year I experienced it all, just that the fireworks were replaced by star gazing and spotting shooting stars...oh it was magical!
What started as a hearty lunch with 25 of us at noon, featuring appetizers, first courses, second courses, cold cuts, farm-fresh fruits, cheeses, and desserts, concluded at midnight with more than three dozen fresh wood-fired pizzas served one after another, all washed down with bottles of wine and chilled beers. Italians definitely know how to have a good time!
Pizza making is considered an art in Italy. 'Pizzaoilo (s.) / pizzaoili (pl.)' (peet-zah-yo-lo/li: pizza maker) as they call them in Italian, are professionals who have mastered the craft of making pizzas. They are the dough whisperers who make magic out of flour, water, salt and yeast.
Well, as easy it might sound, it does require a lot of skill, especially while rolling the dough and transferring it in the oven.
A couple of days before ferragosto, a few friends got together for a casual pizza party of which I was luckily a part. We were around 12-15 of us. Two separate doughs were prepared by the two master pizzaoilis of the group a day before and the dough was very well rested and fermented for around 24 hrs (yes, it’s a long process, but 100% worth the wait!)
We then moved on to arranging our toppings for the various pizzas we would be making that day. Most of the toppings and cheese were farm-fresh, picked the same week, if not the same day, and included:
Fresh basil
Cold pressed extra virgin olive oil (from homegrown olives!)
Mozzarella di buffala (the best there is!!)
Fresh tomato purée
Yellow and red datterini (cherry tomatoes)
Red onions
Mushrooms
Some meat options (all cured in-house)
Nutella and sliced figs (ripe, juicy, sweet figs freshly plucked from the tree—I can never get over this!)
With the first couple of pizzas skillfully crafted by the experts and the oven temperature finally calibrated, it was finally my turn to get my hands dirty. With my toppings all set - tomato sauce, onions, basil, mozzarella - off I went with the littlee dough ball...
I started out by swiftly spreading the soft dough on the wooden table with some semolina, and then swirling it in the air, putting my years of observing this art to test. Well must admit that it wasn't perfect, but the pizza did land in my hand instead of on the ground and these are the small victories I like to celebrate 🙌
We added an additional drizzle of extra virgin olive oil on the freshly baked pizzas, a truly Italian touch that takes your pizza to the next level!
Fast forward to ferragosto celebrations, the night went on with music, free flowing wine and one hot pizza after the other. Around 10 pm, we took to the dance floor, swaying to the typical south Italian tunes. Oh my, such fun!
Trivia: Ferragosto actually dates as far back as 18BC, when the Emperor Augustus introduced the holiday as one of a number of other Roman holidays that were celebrated throughout the month of August
The surprise of the evening was a dance performance to the world-famous Punjabi track "Mundian To Bach Ke Rahi," which we managed to choreograph within an hour that afternoon.
Glimpses from the trials of our spectacular performance as below 😬
What happened next is an experience I can't adequately convey in words or pictures. We went up into the mountains and lay on our car, gazing at the beautiful sky full of twinkling stars above us.
And then we saw them....shooting stars...zooming in the night sky one after the other!
With our hearts full from the spectacular celestial show we had just witnessed, we ended the Ferragosto on an unforgettable note! ♥️
Opmerkingen