The 15th edition of the
Girotonno tuna festival is set to take place from June 22-25 in
the town of Carloforte, on tiny San Pietro Island just off the
southwestern coast of Sardinia, where concerts and live cooking
demos will be held alongside the festival's renowned
International Tuna Competition.
This year's festival, themed "Men, History and Flavours on
the Tuna Route", includes live concerts by Nek on June 22 and
Fiorella Mannoia on June 23, as well as cooking challenges,
sport entertainment, children's games and guided tours of the
town and surrounding areas.
The highlight of the festival, however, is the International
Tuna Competition, where well-known international chefs battle it
out to showcase their culinary skills with tuna.
Among those competing at this year's festival are chefs from
Italy and Norway as well as competition winners from the past
two years: Japanese chef Haruo Hichikawa (2015) and Peruvian
chef Rafael Rodriguez (2016).
There will also be live cooking shows to demonstrate gourmet
dishes based on tuna, with famed chefs such as Filippo La
Mantia, arguably the most famous Sardinian chef in Italy,
resident at Milan's Oste e Cuoco; as well as Stefano De
Gregorio, originally from Busto Arsizio in Varese, now leading
the way at Saporie Lab in Milan.
Their demonstrations will allow visitors to learn directly
from the masters about the art and skill involved in preparing
and serving these fish, which have been swimming in the coastal
waters off Sardinia for centuries.
Radio and TV host Federico Quaranta will lead the festivities
from the stage each evening.
The festival is also an opportunity to discover the small
island of San Pietro, an island-in-an-island, where the local
community has Ligurian linguistic roots and speaks a
Genoese-variant dialect known as Tabarchino.
Carloforte Mayor Marco Simeone said the four days of the
festival give visitors a chance to "experience the identity and
the soul of the place and the people who live there".
A trip to Carloforte during Girotonno is an unforgettable
experience, where the streets and the boardwalk are pulsing with
life.
Carloforte remains one of the few ancient tuna fishing
villages still active in the Mediterranean, with its unpolluted
waters that have hosted schools of tuna during their migrations
for hundreds and hundreds of years.
"Planning a holiday during the days of the festival, you'll
be surprised by at least one of the numerous tourist
attractions: enchanting landscapes, breathtaking beaches and
coves, unpolluted seabeds for fishing or scuba diving to admire
the valuable coral, dishes with local specialities to taste,"
said Simeone.
And the list goes on: excursions to explore some of the most
beautiful villages in Italy, walking itineraries to discover the
small streets known as "caruggi" and the architecture of the
historic centre with its pastel-coloured houses, staircases and
tiny alleys where the scent of seafood drifts through the air,
as well as the charm of the view from the tiny port and the
shorefront.
It's a picture-perfect view, in the right season of the year.
There's everything you need for an unforgettable experience.
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