A dirt road in the country where the paths of time seem to meet those of space, the last shades of the sunset behind a Tuscan hill and among the olive trees, a table more than a hundred meters long illuminated by light bulbs moved by the wind, almost four hundred people eating while joking among themselves: the Spanzanellata of Poggio Danzino in the Valdichiana of Arezzo (between Monte San Savino and Alberoro) it is not a simple festival, but a “sacred” event that has been held with chronometric regularity every second Friday in July for decades.

Gastronomic sacredness that manifests itself in the ancient and peasant rite of preparing panzanella, but also in the social one, since the entire tiny rural village is involved in organizing the festival. Sacredness that seems to pervade even the original inspiration of the founder, that Marine Barbagli who saw in a dream the Madonna suggesting to him to make the first table, with the intent of involving old and young people in a charitable activity that would strengthen friendship and socialization, precisely of those Tuscans who, as it teaches us Malaparteare masters of individualism. The Valdichiana transformed from a malarial swamp to a fertile granary, thanks to the land reclamation carried out between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by the scientist count Victor Fossombronion behalf of the Grand Dukes of Tuscany.