This research has been a personal journey back to my own family roots. I have learnt as much about my own history and identity as I have about the communities and their festivals. The subtitle for the book, ‘A Deleuzian Apprenticeship in Central Italian Communities’, aims to convey this journey of apprenticeship as related both to my own history, which saw me learning to engage with life and its problems in particular ways as I was growing up, but also to the theoretical journey of discovery, which has produced this book, being guided by a particular orientation, but grounded in experience and research. Some of my personal discoveries map very neatly onto the dynamics illustrated in the book. At a certain point it became clear to me how it is that I find myself in a foreign country speaking, teaching and writing in a different language. I realised that this was a trajectory started three generations back at least, connected to the change in agricultural practices that saw my grandparents leaving the land, moving to a village and finding employed work, working to save and support my father to train in a profession that took him away from the area, travelling across the world and marrying a foreigner. When the realisation first arrived it felt shocking. I felt like a cannonball being shot away, when my previous belief had been far more about autonomous agency and decision making.