Sagre Autentiche

Sagre Autentiche is one of the projects I'm most attached to. The design was provided by the agency Cube ProEmotion, which I worked with, but beyond development I contributed heavily to usability and to the design of the key components. The portal went through several versions of layout and features, and in just a few years it has become one of the references for anyone looking for food festivals in Italy.

The project

Sagre Autentiche helps you find «food festivals near you in one click»: you search by where, when and what, or explore by region. Alongside the catalogue there's a community of visitors, an area for organisers, with partner deals, and a blog. Dates come from the web or straight from the organisers.

Architecture and technologies

The work started as a WordPress site; as we collaborated with the agency and with the organisers, the portal also became a management system for those who run the festivals. The portal is built on WordPress, but nothing is used out of the box. Festivals are a custom content type with their own ACF fields, such as place, dates, products and programme, and layouts are Gutenberg blocks developed specifically for the site. Registered bodies and organisers have a private area where they submit their festival and edit its data: the portal grows with information updated at the source, without going through the editorial team for every change.

My work

An Airbnb-style search engine

It's the work I'm proudest of. Search combines place, period and product in a single bar, with filters that update without reloading the page and results synced with an interactive map: the same pattern users know from travel portals, applied to food festivals. The map shows events in the searched area or around the visitor and leads straight to the festival page, so exploring the territory feels natural even on a phone.

SEO: structured data and regional pages

A portal like this lives on local searches, so SEO was part of the project from the start. Every festival publishes its own structured data, with event, place and dates readable by search engines, and on top of that there are purpose-built pages for each region, which capture geographic searches and organise the catalogue naturally.

The outcome

The portal has become, in just a few years, one of the references for anyone looking for food festivals in Italy. Visitors search by place, period or product and see straight away on the map what is happening around them. Dates stay current because the organisers enter them themselves, and the regional pages catch the local searches that bring visitors to the catalogue.