Anchovy Day: the seaside village of Aspra celebrates
its local product with flavours, art, entertainment and tradition
Sunday 17 August 2025
On Sunday 17 August, in the seaside village of Aspra, in Piano Stenditore, Anchovy Day will take place, an evening celebrating the typical product of the Aspra community, with tastings and show cooking, as well as a guided tour of Guttuso’s early frescoes at the Church of Maria SS. Addolorata, organised by the Pro Loco. The folk group “Trinacria Bedda” will entertain the evening. The event, which is sponsored by the Municipality of Bagheria, will start at 7 p.m., while the guided tours will begin at 8.30 p.m. The event will be attended by the director of Gal Metropoli Est, Dr Salvatore Tosi, the mayor of Bagheria, Filippo Tripoli, and the president of the Municipal Council, Andrea Sciortino, as well as food and wine journalists and cultural operators involved in promoting the area. The event is part of a series of initiatives aimed at promoting the tangible and intangible heritage of the AgriCultural District of G.A.L. Metropoli Est and Sicily, as the “European Region of Gastronomy 2025”, and is funded by the PSR Sicilia 2014/2022 Measure 19 – Sub-measure 19.2 P.O. directed by G.A.L. 2025. The aim of the event is to promote the historical, cultural, social and economic value of fishing and the processing of anchovies as a typical product of the cultural and historical tradition of the seaside village of Aspra and to link the promotion of this typical product to the promotion of the cultural heritage of the community in order to strengthen territorial and tourist marketing. The event will take place in the picturesque Piano Stenditore in Aspra, a splendid terrace overlooking the Gulf of Palermo, where the Fair of Handicrafts and Agri-Food Products began on 1 August.
The product being promoted, anchovies, is in fact the flagship product of the Aspra community. Once considered a food for the poor, it has now been re-evaluated by nutritionists for its high content of essential nutrients and offers the maximum guarantee of freshness and affordability, healthiness, combining affordability, taste and delicacy derived from the existence of a historic and vast heritage of regional recipes. Fortunately, anchovies are now considered a great food and gastronomic resource. Seaside villages such as Aspra have a competitive advantage, as they draw on the historical memory and socio-cultural fabric of the area where they operate, with its strong maritime identity and tradition, for their blue fish recipes. In the strategy promoted by Gal Metropoli Est to promote agricultural heritage, the guided tour of the Church of Maria SS. di Aspra, which houses a unique treasure, also plays a central role in the event. Renato Guttuso, still young at the time, created frescoes that caused quite a stir, unique in the world. Their history is very unusual, as is the history of the church itself. It was, in fact, the first parish church in the town, dedicated to the Virgin Mary by the fishermen. The walls of the building needed to be frescoed, so the priest Giuseppe Cipolla turned to a young painter from Bagheria.
This is how the story of Guttuso’s frescoes in Aspra began. The sketches were not submitted to the “Sacred Art Commission” for approval. The artist had portrayed the owners of the boats of Aspra in the faces of the apostles. The frescoes had a short life, because Cardinal Lavitrano asked Monsignor Cipolla to have the paintings whitewashed, as they were considered unsuitable for a place of worship. It would be sixty years before Guttuso’s frescoes in Aspra, which were never completed, could be seen again.
