Food, Festival and Religion explores how communities in northern Italy find a restorative sense of place through foodways, costuming, and other forms of materiality. The festivals explored by the author range geographically from the northern rural corners of Italy to the fashionable heart of urban Milan. The origins of these lived religious events range from Christian to vernacular Italian witchcraft and contemporary Paganism, which is rapidly growing in Italy. Francesca Cianciminio Howell demonstrates that during ritualized occasions, the sacred is located within the mundane and communal feasting, pilgrimage, rituals and costumed events are forms of lived religious materiality. Building on the work of scholars including Foucault, Grimes and Ingold, the author offers a theoretical "Scale of Engagement" which further tests the interfaces between the materialities of place, food, ritual and festivals and provide a widely-applicable model for analyzing grassroots events and community initiatives. Through extensive ethnographic research and fieldwork data, this book demonstrates that that popular Italian festivals are ritualized, liminal spaces, contributing greatly to the fields of religious, performance and ritual studies.