Sutri Gnocchi Festival

A young festival in an ancient village

The Sutri Gnocchi Festival is one of the newest celebrations in the Tuscia region. The first edition took place on Sunday, September 9, 2018, featuring a food stand dedicated to gnocchi, accompanied by lamb skewers and other local delicacies. The event was relaunched with great enthusiasm in September 2022 and has since become a fixed late-summer appointment, organized by the Sutri Pro Loco in the heart of one of Italy's most beautiful villages, in the province of Viterbo, Northern Lazio.

Gnocchi in every style in Piazza Pisanelli

The heart of the festival is Piazza Pisanelli, the living room of Sutri's historic center. Here, the Pro Loco chefs and volunteers prepare gnocchi with the most delicious toppings: meat sauce, mushrooms, pesto, and tomato. They are accompanied by a menu of popular flavors that, over the years, has included grilled meats and sausages, chicken, skewers, and fries, all washed down with local wine. It is a simple and abundant offering, capturing the most authentic spirit of Lazio's village festivals.

Music, dancing, and markets

As with any self-respecting festival, food is only part of the experience. The evenings are enlivened by live music and dancing in the square. In the 2023 edition, for example, the "Reginaldo Caffarelli" marching band opened the festivities, followed by music and dancing with the Lodovico Leo orchestra. The experience is completed by artisan markets and stalls set up throughout the historic center, open from the afternoon until late at night, turning the festival into a gourmet stroll through the village alleys.

Discovering the ancient city of Sutri

The festival is also the perfect opportunity to discover Sutri, the "Civitas vetustissima" perched on a tuff spur along the Via Francigena. During the event, guided tours of the city's heritage are organized: the Roman amphitheater entirely carved into the tuff, the Etruscan-Roman necropolis with its rock-cut tombs, the Mithraeum (now the Church of Madonna del Parto), the Cathedral, and the Templar church. Few other villages in Lazio allow you to move in just a few steps from a steaming plate of gnocchi to two and a half millennia of history.

Sutri's gastronomic vocation

The Gnocchi Festival is part of a long-standing gastronomic calendar in the Sutri area. In fact, just a few days later, the town celebrates the historic Bean Festival, dedicated to the prized local "regina" bean, which has been running for nearly fifty years. For food lovers, the transition between August and September is the ideal time to visit this corner of the Tuscia region, between the Province of Viterbo and the Lazio Region, where peasant cuisine is still the protagonist of village life.