The Impruneta Grape Festival, an event with good wine and tradition
The Grape Festival is not a common village feast, but it is a sheer allegory of the Grape, where each district of the town gives off its own creativity in celebrating this marvellous fruit, from which we get the wine.
The beginning of the demonstrations is on 4 September and ending in the Sunday, 28 September, with the traditional parade of floats.
Without a fixed scheme for the preparation, each district may express itself as everyone considers more opportune. Therefore, all the year round, people meet to discuss, study and think how to represent the magnificence of the grape in creating different styles of constructions and scenarios in order to present a different “face” in every edition.
The Grape Festival is not just the last-Sunday-of-September show performed, in the splendid backdrop of Buondelmonti Square, but it is an intense dressing of 30-40 days. All the nights, the fresh nights of September, are spent in each quarter working, having a dinner together and drinking a glass of good wine. Without sleeping, the nights are spent in constructing, cutting, sewing, dancing, nailing, gluing grape on the constructions and discussing until arguing. When the morning comes, everyone goes to work, but “having a bee in one’s bonnet” for that creature that is taking a form: “the float”.
This performance, the first in Italy, was born in 1926. At that time the farms of the village took part in this fair, whit little allegoric floats drawn by oxes, to advertise agricultural products. In 1930, the farms “gave the baton” to the four districts in which Impruneta is still divided. The famous spirit of competition among the districts was born !.
With the passing of time the floats are becoming bigger and bigger, the constructions are higher and higher, the choreography even more perfect and full of “special effects”.
