Agrifeasts: Remarks on the festivalization of rural life.

This chapter examines the festivalization of rural life in Italy through the analytical category of "agrifeasts"—festive events that stage pre-industrial agricultural labour and its material culture. Tracing a historical arc from the agrarian rites studied by early folklorists, through the top-down agricultural celebrations of the Fascist regime, to the post-war collapse of peasant lifeworlds, the chapter argues that it was precisely the rupture with lived agricultural practice that made reenactment possible: once agriculture ceased to be a central economic activity, its festive representation shifted from celebration to evocation. Drawing on ethnographic material from three villages in the Bolsena Lake area (Marta, Bolsena, and Trevinano), the chapter distinguishes different configurations of agrifeasts—a centuries-old religious festival transformed into reenactment, a short-lived grassroots threshing festival driven by embodied memory, and a tourist-oriented staged peasant wedding performed by professional actors. Despite their differences, all three cases operate within a heritage paradigm shaped by two historical layers: Fascist-era rural populism and the post-1960s nostalgia for a vanished peasant world. The chapter concludes that, across their heterogeneous forms, agrifeasts function as catalysts for public participation and as devices of collective recognition for communities historically marginalized by their agricultural past.