San Vito Lo Capo is a beach village at the north-western tip of Sicily, and couscous is local food there — cuscusu alla trapanese, made with fish, arrived with Arab rule and never left. The festival stages an international championship in which chefs from Italy, Tunisia, Morocco, Senegal, Israel, Palestine and elsewhere cook their own versions and are judged, alongside a week of tastings and concerts on the beach.
Its framing is explicitly about the Mediterranean as a shared kitchen rather than a border, which in this location is not a rhetorical point.
No attendance figure is recorded here in this pass.
The late-September timing is deliberate: the beach season has ended, the village is reachable, and the weather still holds. The road in from Trapani is single-lane and slow on festival weekends.
PlanningSeptember, not August — scheduled after the beach season so the village can hold it.