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Festival of wheat (Foglianise) The Wheat Festival of Foglianise, an Italian town in the province of Benevento, in Campania, is a patronal festival that takes place every year from 8 to 18 August.

It has ancient origins, probably pagan, linked to the abundance of the harvest. Today the festival is linked to the cult of San Rocco, patron saint of the town.

A characterizing element of the event is the parade of wheat wagons on the morning of August 16th, a procession of miniature reproductions of famous monuments, agricultural tools relating to the harvest, or works arising from the imagination of the "wagon creator", created using different weaving techniques of wheat stalks parade through the town. The "straw artists" give life to "braids", "laces", refined workmanships that look like woven wefts.

Over time, alongside the known and widespread techniques, others have been experimented and applied to wooden or iron scaffolding, denoting a continuous evolution of the event; the models are rendered with realism, through the creation of mullioned windows, trefoils, flying buttresses and twisted columns. The parade of floats, pulled by tractors or animals, along the "tradition route", attracts numerous tourists.

Wheat wagon depicting the facade of the metropolitan cathedral of Santa Maria Assunta in Modena The festival was born as the Festival of Abundance in 1482, a pagan festival dedicated to thanksgiving for the wheat harvest.[citation needed] With the passage of time and with the advent of Christianity, on the occasion of the plague that struck the area, the citizens invoked Saint Rocco, to whom some miraculous healings are attributed. the current way of carrying it out was born in 1728 with the arrival in the town of the saint's relic and the creation of the first wagon, a 25 meter palio made on different registers.

In 2012 the President of the Republic Giorgio Napolitano awarded Foglianise the title of city, donating the medal of the Presidency of the Republic. In 2008 Campania included the Foglianise Wheat Festival in the register of major events of national and international importance, so much so that it was also present at Expo 2015.

The Foglianise festival, together with similar events in the municipalities of Fontanarosa, Flumeri, Mirabella Eclano, Villanova del Battista, San Marco dei Cavoti and Jelsi, is part of the heritage community of the wheat festivals, within which a heritage project is underway UNESCO winner of the tender and financed by the Campania region entitled Rituals and artistic floats of wheat. Research and studies aimed at developing a network application dossier for registration in the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity UNESCO[4].