Notte Verde

The largest festival of the land in Puglia

Notte Verde was born in 2012 in Castiglione d'Otranto, a small hamlet in the municipality of Andrano in the province of Lecce, and over the years it has become the largest festival in Puglia dedicated to the land, the environment, and agroecology. With the subtitle AgriCulture, utopias and community, the event attracts thousands of people from all over Salento and Puglia every late August, transforming a village of a few hundred inhabitants into a national reference point for those who believe in a different way of living and cultivating the land.

A village that becomes an open-air laboratory

For a few days, the narrow streets and squares of the historic center, from Piazza della Libertà to Palazzo Mellacqua, fill with farmers' market stalls, exhibitions, and thematic installations. The village becomes a widespread laboratory: you move from an alley dedicated to ancient seeds to a courtyard transformed into a community kitchen, following a path that combines flavors, knowledge, and encounters. The atmosphere is that of a great community festival, sober and participatory, far from large commercial stages.

Music, food, and agroecology

The Notte Verde program alternates moments of reflection with moments of celebration. There are folk and singer-songwriter concerts, often with free admission, which enliven the squares until late at night; there are workshops on natural bread, bread-making, community gardens, and agricultural biodiversity; there are zero-mile tastings with typical local products and solidarity dinners. There is no shortage of debates, book presentations, and dialogues on ecology, peace, food, and rights, which every year bring scholars, journalists, and prominent activists to the small village.

The Casa delle Agriculture: a community that brought grain back to life

The soul of the event is the Casa delle Agriculture Tullia e Gino Odv, an association born from the desire of a group of young people to recover abandoned land, re-sow ancient grains, and restore life to the local agricultural economy. From their experience, mills, community ovens, and social agriculture projects have been born, which today make Castiglione d'Otranto a small model of regeneration for inland territories. Notte Verde is the annual showcase of this collective journey.

A festival of ideas and civic engagement

Beyond the gastronomic and musical dimension, Notte Verde is a festival of ideas: every edition has a central theme — peace, land rights, the role of women, concrete utopias — around which meetings and testimonies are built. It is this ability to hold together popular celebration and civic engagement that makes Notte Verde a unique appointment in the panorama of Puglian events, capable of speaking to the local public and to those who arrive from outside to discover the most authentic and supportive face of Salento.