Melfi Events

Melfi's calendar is agricultural and religious, with one major historical pageant.

Pentecost and the Pig Festival

The Festa della Pentecoste is the town's patronal celebration, and it is bound up with an older tradition in which a pig was raised communally through the year and paraded before the feast. It survives as a procession with a strong rural character, quite unlike the polished saint's days of the coast.

Federicus

A medieval pageant held in the borgo and around the castle, reconstructing the Melfi of Frederick II with costume, crafts and a procession. It is a modern creation but a substantial one, and it is the week the castle is properly used rather than simply visited.

La Varola

Melfi's own chestnut festival, the Sagra della Varola, fills the borgo in October: chestnuts roasted in the streets, the cellars and courtyards of the old town opened up, wine from the Vulture, and stalls through the medieval lanes. It is the town's biggest annual event after the patronal feast and it is aimed squarely at people from the surrounding province rather than at visitors.

Harvest and chestnuts

From late September into November the Vulture villages run wine and chestnut festivals in succession — the real calendar of the area, advertised locally and worth following. The Aglianico harvest is among the last in Italy.

Christmas and Holy Week

Nativity scenes are staged in the rock churches and the tuff cellars under the borgo, which is a better setting for them than any church, and Holy Week brings processions down through the old town. Both are small, local and unadvertised, and in a town with this little tourism that is exactly what they are for.