A couple of years ago my sister and her boyfriend made a special trip out to visit us in Italy because we offered them an un-turn-downable lifetime-first opportunity: the chance to be one of the delegates at the Asparagus festival in Passo San Ginesio, one of our local villages.
My sister is a reasonably obsessive supporter of niche passions – be it the Brighton procession of outlandish facial hair or the annual air guitar championship. She has a love of things that other people go to a lot of trouble to love. Asparagus love was a new one on her.
We were all in a bit of a spin and decided to prepare for the big day by, well, by eating lots of asparagus. Is there any food which passes so extraordinarily quickly through the nephrons of the kidney? One has barely swallowed…
The big day dawned and we headed down to the village, expecting to see people dressed as giant asparaguses and legion floats boasting different asparagus-based delectables. And of course bunches and bunches of that heavenly stem-thin asparagus that those in the know gather from secret spots in the wild.
There was none of this. What there was, was a strange exhibition of photos of plants as well as the plants themselves – none of them asparagus – which my sister described as an ‘earnest exhibition of weeds’. There was also a tractor, with trailer attached, carrying happy children in unambitious circles around the car park.
This remains one of the more mysterious days of our time in Italy. Other festivals – celebrating everything from artichokes to Nutella – have over-delivered. The strange lack of appearance of a single stem of asparagus at the annual asparagus festival is a puzzle up there, for us, and on a level with the continued popularity of Berlusconi. Perhaps the real asparagus devotees, having cunningly diverted all the local asparagus dilettantes, were out gathering those tasty stems from a local hill.
