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Festa Italiana is the UK’s largest, most exciting and vibrant festival of Italian food, drink and culture.
Taking place at Manchester’s Cathedral Gardens, the event is now in its fifth year following an emphatic return in 2021, after a Covid enforced break, which saw it have its most successful edition to date.
Brought to you by Manchester favourite, the family-run Salvi’s, Festa Italiana is the epitome of the city’s Italian community and heritage; it takes an undeniable inspiration from the traditional festivals in Italy but chucks in a healthy portion of Mancunian charm to create a perfect balance for a weekend of the very best in authentic food, drink, music and performance.
Our role was to build upon the success we achieved last year and deliver a campaign taking in all of the different elements of Festa Italiana 2022.
Because Festa Italiana is a free-to-enter weekend-long festival, brought to you by family-run Italian restaurant group Salvi’s, we worked really closely with the Salvi’s events team to identify the key stories from the programme to ensure that they were amplified appropriately within the campaign.
We also communicated with all festival partners, sponsors, contributors, celebrity chefs and entertainers throughout the campaign so that each and every one of them was highlighted within all comms that went out into the world.
A major part of the Festa is always an intimate chefs’ table dinner featuring top class Italian celebrity chefs, this year being: Gennaro Contaldo (Saturday Kitchen, Two Greedy Italians, Jamie and Jimmy’s Friday Night Feast), Giancarlo Caldesi (Return to Tuscany, Saturday Kitchen, Sunday Brunch), and Aldo Zilli (The One Show, This Morning, Celebrity Masterchef), hosted and cooked by Maurizio Cecco (Owner of Salvi’s and head honcho at Festa Italiana UK), with fresh pasta made from scratch by Carmela Serano Hayes (Carmela’s Kitchen).
The feast is the only event as part of the Festa that requires people to buy a ticket, so we built this into the campaign and separated it slightly from the rest of the programme; making sure that it was always clear how special the experience would be for those in attendance, resulting in a complete sell-out.
Over the course of the Festa campaign we secured over 40 pieces of national and regional coverage over a spread of online, print and broadcast media outlets such as The i, BBC Radio Manchester, iNews, Manchester Evening News, Time Out, Creative Tourist, Manchester’s Finest, The Manc, About Manchester, and many more.
This celebration of Italian food, drink and culture returns to the piazza in Cathedral Gardens in Manchester city centre. Workshops, signings and demonstrations are also available when you are not busy devouring the authentic food.
Brought to the city by family-run Italian restaurant group Salvi’s, the festival has become something of a favourite amongst local foodies – earning its stripes as a great place to discover locally-made Italian treats.
