How many gnocchi have we made this evening?
This is what the ladies of Jalmicco ask each other when, finally, at the end of the first evening of the festival, they get to go home, after a last beer all together.
There’s lots of Friuli-ness in these town festivals and that of Jalmicco - one of Palmanova’s villages - is one of Friuli Venezia Giulia’s liveliest.
Sagre dai Borgs is more than 50 years old now. Half a century of history which makes this event one of lower Friuli’s most traditional and long-lasting.
The festival is held on the occasion of the St Mary Magdalene feast day on 22nd July, the town’s patron saint’s day.
It was set up at the behest of parish priest Don Silvio Lesa and the community council he presided over which for some time organised the celebrations in Jalmicco centre, covering the whole of Piazza Unione. The festival’s main attractions were then ballroom dancing, the lucky dip and the Torello lottery. The whole town got involved in making the food which was mainly barbecued meat, fish and omelettes which were served up under the square’s portico (no longer extant). The heart of the festival was the eagerly awaited midnight pasta. The festival took place without seats and occupied the whole square, bringing the town’s limited car traffic to a halt.

Later the parish made available the current festival area and organisation passed to the tourist office with the introduction of the four village tournament (Borg di Sore, Borg di Sot, Place e Palma, and Cjasalos) which gave it its name. The villages remember the historic figures of “Cocco”, Adua and Elvira thanks to whose hard work the festival modernised, becoming famous, above all, for its gnocchi in ragout sauce made on the spot.
And this is the secret of the event’s success - the hands of the gnocchi makers. Old and young hands, experience and apprenticeship.

Making gnocchi by hand, mixing them, letting them rest, cooking them, dressing them with ragout with meat or duck, serving them and savouring them. It is a precise, unbroken chain of movements passed down through the generations, simple actions requiring expertise and opening up to a cursus honorum, around the counter, too. The most experienced women make the mixture. The others watch and learn. They roll, cut and dust with flour. Next year some of them will mix.
There’s time for laughter and storytelling. Gossip and intimacy. Hugs between people who only see each other at these yearly events.
Each dish coming out of the kitchen embodies the town’s smiles, fun and stories. And there are lots, at least one for each of the 500 portions served up over five days for a grand total of one hundredweight of potatoes boiled.
The community spirit is what holds it all together and has allowed the magic to be recreated every July for over 50 years. From Thursday to Monday on the last weekend in July, every villager expresses a new identity. Around the gnocchi makers table the hands of office workers and teachers, bank clerks and shop assistants, retired people and housewives interlock.
Later on, an engineer mans the barbecue, a dentist looks after the fire and gets the quantities right, a surveyor grills the polenta and a student calls out the orders in a clear, firm voice.
It is a small world, an almost perfect machine with a single purpose: getting people in to celebrate, get to know traditional flavours and celebrate the sense of community and friendship.
There a great deal of Friuli to discover, even in a magical village festival.