Threshing Festival

A festival that brings threshing back to life

There is a time of year when Sant'Angelo dei Lombardi, in the province of Avellino, stops looking forward and turns back to the past: these are the days of the Threshing Festival, which has enlivened the Sant'Antuono district in the heart of Alta Irpinia since 2012. The core idea is simple yet powerful: to put old agricultural machines back into operation and demonstrate, in person, how grain was separated from straw before farming became as mechanized as we know it today. This is not a museum reconstruction, but a participatory re-enactment filled with noise, dust, calloused hands, and applause.

Sant'Antuono district, the natural stage

The event takes place entirely in the Sant'Antuono district, a rural hamlet on the outskirts of the town. For a few days, the fields and farmyards become an exhibition space, a performance area, and an open-air dining room: historic threshers are lined up alongside modern tractors, work tools are put back on display, and local families open the district to visitors arriving from all over Irpinia and well beyond the borders of Campania.

Vintage tractors, straw sculptures, and farm machinery

The most recognizable symbol of the festival is the tractor parade: vintage and modern vehicles depart from the district and reach the town center, where they receive the traditional blessing from the parish priest before returning in procession. Alongside the parade, past editions have featured:

• Static displays of threshers, tractors, and ancient and modern agricultural machinery;
• Threshing demonstrations, also repeated in a night-time version with spotlights shining on the machines at work;
• The famous sculptures made from hay bales, crafted with great skill and creativity by the district's residents;
• Inflatables and an educational farm for children;
• Conferences dedicated to rural development and the certification of historic agricultural machinery;
• In 2025, the first vintage car and vehicle rally organized with the CVSI, the Irpinian Historic Vehicle Club of Ariano Irpino.

The rural cuisine of Alta Irpinia

The culinary side is managed by stands set up in the district, where visitors can taste typical local specialties and traditional rural dishes, accompanied by local wine and finished with homemade desserts. In recent years, collective lunches have also been organized by reservation—moments when the shared table becomes the true heart of the festival: this is how the community tells its story, more through its food than its words.

Music and evenings in the district

Every evening, the district lights up with live music: folk groups, traditional revival bands, and ensembles from the Irpinian scene take turns on stage until late at night. The musical selection follows the spirit of the event, with a focus on the popular repertoire of the South and the sounds that have always accompanied village festivals in Alta Irpinia.

A meeting between generations

The Threshing Festival is not just another summer event on the town's calendar. It is, above all, a generational meeting: the elderly rediscover the gestures of their own work and explain them to children, who see for the first time how bread was made. The result is a rediscovery of the rural life of the past that hides neither the sacrifices nor the moments of conviviality of that era.

Sant'Angelo dei Lombardi and its surroundings

Those who arrive for the festival will find a territory that deserves more than a quick stop. The center of Sant'Angelo dei Lombardi is dominated by the Castello degli Imperiali, while just a few kilometers away stands the Abbazia del Goleto, one of the most evocative monastic complexes in inland Campania and home to the Goleto Festival in summer. All around, Alta Irpinia unfolds with cultivated hills, quiet villages, and an enogastronomic tradition that thrives on grain, cheeses, cured meats, and great wines. In this context, the Threshing Festival acts as a gateway: you come for the tractors and the threshers, you stay for the landscape.