Senerchia Roots Festival

A festival that reconnects the threads of emigration

The Roots Festival is the cultural event through which Senerchia, a municipality of just over seven hundred inhabitants in the Upper Sele Valley, in the province of Avellino (Campania), reflects on its history of departures and returns. It is a journey that places migrant memory at its core: the families who left Irpinia for the Americas and Northern Europe and their descendants, who today return to the village in search of a surname, a family home, or a word of dialect.

From the first editions with Eugenio Bennato

The event was born in 2022 under the name "Le Radici Festival" and under the artistic direction of singer-songwriter Eugenio Bennato, one of the most renowned interpreters of Southern Italian folk music. The second edition, on August 12 and 13, 2023, brought Bennato himself to the village with his Vento popolare tour—a story told through songs of migration, brigandage, and the Mediterranean—and, the following evening, Mario Incudine together with Fiorenza Calogero with the show Anima Folk. The spaces involved were those of the village: Corso Garibaldi, the historic center, the sports field, and Palazzo Cuozzo, where tambourine, dance, and choral singing workshops were held in the late afternoon. The organization was entrusted to the Pro Loco of Senerchia, and the photographic exhibition Senerchiese was set up at Palazzo Cuozzo, dedicated to the individual and collective history of the village through images of emigrated families.

Inside the Migrant Roots Festival

Since 2025, the Senerchia event has joined the Migrant Roots Festival circuit, the "diffused festival" promoted by the Glocal Think association and artistically directed by Emanuela Sica, which visits numerous Italian municipalities every year with the same common thread: looking to the past to rediscover the stories, traditions, and bonds that have shaped local identities. The August 3, 2025 stop took place entirely at Palazzo Cuozzo, alternating between workshops, round tables, and convivial moments.

Palazzo Cuozzo, the heart of the event

The historic palace in the center of Senerchia is the symbolic venue of the festival: here, over the years, photographic exhibitions—from Senerchiese to I volti delle Radici (The Faces of Roots)—participatory workshops, and public meetings have taken place. It is an intimate space that encourages direct dialogue between speakers, residents, and returning visitors.

What to find at the festival

• Roots Workshops: creative writing, tambourine, dance, and choral singing, open to those who want to re-engage with their family history.
• Photographic Exhibitions: portraits and family albums of Senerchia emigrants, set up in the halls of Palazzo Cuozzo.
• Meetings and Panels on Italian roots around the world, with scholars, administrators, and witnesses of migrant memory.
• Live Folk Music, a hallmark of the early editions signed by Eugenio Bennato.
• Tastings and final toasts with local Irpinian products.

Senerchia and the Upper Sele Valley

Senerchia is located at the eastern edge of the province of Avellino, on the border with the province of Salerno, in a landscape of mountains and waters that has profoundly marked the life of the village. It is a small municipality with a reduced resident community but a very large diaspora: this very imbalance explains why the theme of roots, here, is not a nostalgic exercise but a concrete question of the future.

Roots tourism as a lever for development

A feature that distinguishes the Senerchia stop is the focus on economic and sustainable development: as early as 2025, the program dedicated specific space to the discussion between the festival and the "Montagna D'Amare" DMO, with the goal of transforming the return of descendants into a tourist flow useful to the village. Roots tourism is today one of the few credible prospects for revitalization for the small municipalities of the Southern Apennines, and the festival is both a showcase and a laboratory for it.

Towards a new stop in Senerchia

The 2026 calendar published by the organizers of the Migrant Roots Festival places the Irpinian event on May 16, 2026, at the Goleto Abbey, in Sant'Angelo dei Lombardi, and not in Senerchia. A new Senerchia day is therefore not currently confirmed: those wishing to participate should follow the official festival channels and the municipality's social media pages.