Ascona's lakefront promenade on Lago Maggiore is given over for one Saturday to the chestnut: around two and a half tonnes roasted in rotating drums over wood fires, plus chestnut honey, jam, cake, bread and grappa, with the Ticino valleys' producers along the waterfront.
The chestnut was the staple carbohydrate of the Ticino valleys before maize and potatoes arrived — the castagna was called the bread tree — and the autumn castagnate across the canton are a direct inheritance of that.
No attendance figure is published.
It is one day and it begins in the morning; the chestnuts run out. Ascona is ten minutes from Locarno, and October in Ticino is reliably the best month on that lake.
PlanningAnchored to an early-October Saturday; one day only, and it starts in the morning.