Fried Chips Fair in Santa Maria a Monte

From 16 to 20th August, the potato becomes the queen of a festival that has been carrying it in triumph through the streets of the village of Santa Maria a Monte for half a century now. Thousands of people gather every year to taste the fries, fried in the large frying pan in Piazza della Vittoria. And they even take the opportunity to go up to the village in its characteristic spiral form and visit the Carducci House Museum, the Museum of the Blessed Giuntini (the patron saint) up to the Archaeological Park ‘La Rocca’ that has unearthed Etruscan and Longobard remains.

The festival is, in short, an excellent ‘excuse’, a valid reason to explore this jewel set against the Cerbaie hills, to climb the same narrow streets trodden by the poet Giosuè Carducci, who returned every Saturday from San Miniato, where he taught in a classical high school, to greet his father, the town’s doctor.

The Tosca Potato
Considered a poor food, the potato is, instead, a precious underground treasure, rich in vitamin C and potassium, which must be sifted out by digging with hands dirty with earth; harvested early in the morning, at the end of July, before the sun burns too much. They know this well in Santa Maria a Monte, where the cultivation of the ‘Tosca’ potato has its roots in ancient times: generations of farmers have tilled the countryside around this ancient village, a military outpost of Valdarno in the Middle Ages, so much so that Pisa, Lucca and Florence fought bitterly over it.

The Tosca is a very tasty yellow potato that only gets its flavour from these lands. It is a registered trademark and the few producers, who harvest several hundred quintals of it every year, are very proud of their ‘nuggets’, whose cultivation is followed step by step by an agronomist.