Sunflower Festival

A festival born for inland areas

The Sunflower Festival is a young event that has already made a name for itself in the Cilento cultural scene. Held in Ceraso, a small town in the Province of Salerno, Campania, it focuses on a question that is both simple and decisive for inland villages: how to stay, and how to make those who arrive stay. The festival began in 2025 as a public showcase of the best practices developed by the Municipality's SAI (Reception and Integration System) project, and it quickly expanded to a wider audience, opening its doors to citizens, associations, institutions, and schools of all levels.

The name is no coincidence. The sunflower, which follows the light and grows wherever it finds space, is adopted as a symbol of light, rebirth, and shared energy: an agricultural and civic image, perfectly consistent with a territory where landscape, agriculture, and community life are one and the same.

Palazzo Di Lorenzo, the Mediterranean Agora

The venue for the event is Palazzo Di Lorenzo, a historic building in Ceraso now returned to the community under the name Agorà Mediterranea. It is a place that tells the story of the festival itself: a recovered and reopened space where debates, workshops, photography exhibitions, concerts, and social gatherings are held. Participatory installations and outdoor spaces hosting evening activities are set up around the palace.

The themes of the days

Each day of the festival revolves around a theme, addressed first through public discussion and then through workshops, artistic activities, and moments of sharing. There are four recurring themes:

• Inland areas, traditions, and innovation: what development opportunities remain for villages and how traditions can become a lever for the future;
• Adolescence: emotions and vulnerabilities of the young, with participatory listening paths, role-playing games, and creative contests for schools;
• Common goods and confiscated assets: social reuse as a concrete tool for territorial development, told through direct testimonies;
• Hospitality and inclusive communities: the stories of those who arrived and those who stayed, brought to the stage through theatrical and narrative languages.

Participatory experiences

The Sunflower Festival is not a spectator event. Among the most recognizable proposals is the Field of Rights, a collective planting where each participant dedicates a sunflower to a right they want to see grow in their community: a simple gesture that becomes a living installation for the entire summer. Alongside this, the Room of Unspoken Words offers an immersive journey of testimonies, designed especially for teenage audiences. The picture is completed by photography exhibitions, art workshops, and tastings dedicated to local Cilento products.

Music, theatre, and the flavours of Cilento

After the afternoon discussions, the evenings change pace: live concerts, DJ sets, screenings, and social theatre performances accompany the audience until late. It is the moment when the festival becomes a village feast, with stalls from local producers and tastings of typical Cilento products — the area that gave its name to the Mediterranean Diet, recognized as an intangible heritage of humanity and experienced here as a daily practice, not just a slogan.

Who organizes it

The festival is promoted by the SAI project of the Municipality of Ceraso and is produced by the Apeiron Social Cooperative, which manages local reception, together with the AttiVallo Cooperative and the Cilento Bio-District, as part of the Agorà Mediterranea network. It is a chain of entities that works all year round on social agriculture, civil economy, and inclusion: the festival is its public showcase and a moment for collective assessment.

Ceraso and Cilento

Ceraso is located in the Vallo della Lucania area, a short distance from the Cilento coast and within the Cilento, Vallo di Diano and Alburni National Park. It is a land of olive groves, chestnut forests, and small villages, where depopulation is a concrete issue and where initiatives like this try to build a cultural response even before an economic one. For those visiting Cilento in the summer, the festival is also an opportunity to see the hinterland up close, far from the crowded beaches.