Ask a friend in Florence what she is doing this Sunday, and there is a good chance the answer is a village you have never heard of, an hour's drive into the hills. She will not be going for a church, or a view, or a restaurant. She will be going because of a smell.
It is the smell of October in half of Italy. And it comes with a small, practical dress code that I have come to love.
The festival for the humblest food
In Italy a sagra is a village food festival, and in October the most beloved ones are for chestnuts. The sagra delle castagne is where you follow the woodsmoke from the parking lot to a square full of long tables, and to volunteers shaking chestnuts over open fire in iron pans with holes punched in the bottom.
Today is one of the big days. In Marradi, a small town in the Tuscan Apennines northeast of Florence, the 63rd Sagra delle Castagne fills the old center on every Sunday in October this year, the 4th, the 11th, today and the 25th. The star is the local marron buono, eaten fresh from the fire, baked into the town's famous chestnut cake, or folded into castagnaccio, the dense, rosemary-scented chestnut-flour cake of Tuscany.
South of there, in Soriano nel Cimino, near Viterbo, the 59th edition of that town's chestnut festival ends today after more than two weeks of costumed parades, flag throwers and a contest between its four historic neighborhoods, all under the walls of the Orsini castle.
It is a lot of celebration for a food that was, for centuries, what mountain families ate when there was nothing else. In the Apennines the chestnut was called l'albero del pane, the bread tree, because the dried nuts were ground into flour that got villages through the winter.
Dressed for smoke and cobblestones
This is where the clothes come in, because a chestnut Sunday asks for something specific. The towns are steep and paved in stone. You will stand in line, then walk, then stand again. The morning in the hills is cool and the afternoon in the sun is not. And by three o'clock everything you are wearing will smell faintly of woodsmoke.
So nobody wears anything precious. What you see instead, on women of every age, is the same easy uniform: soft trousers with room to move, a knit or a light layer that can come off at noon, flat shoes that can handle cobblestones, and a bag that leaves both hands free for a paper cone of hot chestnuts.
The colors take care of themselves. Olive, moss, brown, rust. Nobody plans it, but the crowd in a chestnut square ends up looking like the woods around it.
The Sunday version I'd wear
If I had a free Sunday in Tuscany this month, this is what I would pack. The olive trousers above are by Le Streghe, made with deep front pleats and a high waist that release into a full, straight leg. They look tailored standing in line, and they feel like nothing on a hill. A white tank underneath, a knit over the shoulders for the morning, flat sandals or a low boot.
Then one soft bag, carried in the hand or on the shoulder. Ours is a hand-woven hobo in sage green, with a knot tied into its top handle, big enough for a wallet, a phone, sunglasses and a bag of chestnuts for later. Its color sits somewhere between olive and moss, which is exactly the palette of an October Sunday in the Apennines. The sage woven bag is the piece that makes the outfit look chosen rather than thrown on.
None of it is complicated. That is the point of a sagra: a whole town dressed for comfort, eating something simple, and somehow looking better than most people do at a wedding. For the shoes that make a day like this possible, here are the four pairs an Italian woman actually wears.
We do not have chestnut groves on the Gulf Coast. But we do have Sundays, and the same outfit works for a farmers market and a long lunch here as well as it does in the hills. More soft, carry-everything shapes are in the bags.
Dates: Radio Mugello; NewTuscia.
She travels to Italy each season to hand-select the boutique's collection.
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