Festival growing in its third year

By Mary Wade Burnside

FAIRMONT — Rose Mary Tennant spent this week making pitta piata, the fruit-and-cinnamon nut roll many Italian-Americans serve around the holidays.

She follows her mother’s recipe — adding in oregano, which sets it apart from others — and she also spells it differently, with a silent “m” at the beginning of the second word, something she learned during a trip to Italy.

Tennant will be selling her creation during the Feast of the Seven Fishes Festival, which takes place from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Saturday on Monroe Street in downtown Fairmont.

“I think it’s one of the greatest things to happen to Fairmont,” Tennant said. “I think Vera Sansalone deserves a lot of credit for getting it started and working so hard.”

Sansalone, the executive director of Main Street Fairmont, which sponsors the festival, has high hopes that this year’s event, the third one, will grow again just as it did last year.

“I think the first year we did it, we estimated that we had 1,500 people, and then last year, we had closer to 3,000,” Sansalone said.

The first year, 14 vendors sold fish dishes that give the festival its name, and last year that number grew to 21. Now 28 vendors are registered for this year’s festival, including newcomers The Aquarium Lounge and Country Club Bakery, plus a caricature artist who will do drawings on Feast of the Seven Fishes paper, “So it’s kind of a keepsake,” Sansalone said.

Workers will spend the week getting Monroe Street ready for the event, stringing up lights and setting up the booths, all of which adds an ethnic winter street festival feel.

The idea for the festival came from Lou Spatafore, co-owner of Friendly Furniture Galleries, after he saw a copy of the graphic novel “The Feast of the Seven Fishes,” written by Marion County native Robert Tinnell.

A filmmaker who now lives in Morgantown, Tinnell drew on his childhood experiences growing up in Worthington and Rivesville and the Christmas Eves he would spend at his great grandmother’s and then his grandfather’s house, where the grown-ups would fix several different fish dishes to be served instead of meat.

“I thought it was a great idea,” Tinnell said. “I instinctively knew it was going to work. I just wanted to get away from the Chef Boyardee thing and back to the real Italian food and traditions. They are like artwork.”

Kevin Sansalone, city attorney for Fairmont and Vera Sansalone’s husband, has sold beans called lupinis at a booth with city planner Jay Rogers for the past two years under the name Genco Olive Oil Co. The dry beans require soaking, boiling and then more soaking in saltwater in order to make them soft and tasty.

“It’s just a snack, like a peanut,” said Sansalone, who noted that Rogers will man the booth this year without him because he will be attending an out-of-town wedding.

The Food Network had expressed interest in the festival and had planned to attend to shoot footage for a special on holiday traditions that would air next year, Sansalone said. However, the special got canceled, but Sansalone has not given up on getting a well-known chef to the festival.

“We’re going to keep trying,” she said. “We’ve sent e-mails to a lot of different personalities that are on the Food Network, like Giada (De Laurentiis) and Rachael Ray. If we can catch their interest, maybe they will come.”

During the festival, musicians perform at the old firehouse on Monroe Street. Their songs are piped out into the street and dancers twirl around inside. Last year, Pittsburgh musician Joe Negri, known from his appearances on “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,” sang traditional Italian songs.

This year, Pittsburgh band Five Guys Named Moe will fill the air with their Frank Sinatra-Tony Bennett-Louis Prima songs, and Youngstown, Ohio-based Bel Duetto, a male and female vocalist, will sing works that include some opera, Sansalone said.

“We found them by searching the Internet,” she said. “They had a You Tube video and we listened to that, and they’ve performed at different Italian festivals. We wanted a female vocalist because we haven’t had one the last two years.”

The major paid event will be the Italian cooking school at 1 p.m., headed up by Tinnell’s wife, Shannon, for $15.

“We do seven new dishes at the cooking demonstration and you get samples of what gets made,” Shannon Tinnell said.

The Christmas parade will take place at 5:30 p.m. and then the festival ends with a mass led by Father Hilarion Cann at 7 p.m.

A new element for this year’s festival will be a homemade cookie and winemaking contest. Those cost $5 each to enter and require pre-registration, which contestants can do probably until Thursday, Sansalone said.

“We wanted to add something new to the festival this year,” she said. “We thought it would be neat to have a contest where you could showcase some of your family recipes on cookies and on homemade wine. There are so many people in the region that make homemade wine, so we thought that would be a neat thing to do.”

Cookies such as pizzelles, galettes, tordillis and even biscotti are possibilities, Sansalone said.

“We want everyone that enters the contest to bring a dozen of the cookies and then they will be judged on presentation and of course the taste and the appearance of the cookies,” she said.

Like the cooking of the fish dishes, the winemaking also gives people an opportunity to pass down another tradition to their children. Spatafore has made his batch for the season and his daughter Angela helped out.

First, he and his friend go to Pittsburgh to get the specific winemaking grapes and then they crush the them and put the liquid in an oak barrel. Then they placed the wine in bottles.

“We needed a third hand and she came out and learned how to bottle wine out of a barrel,” Spatafore said.

E-mail Mary Wade Burnside at mwburnside@timeswv.com.