The festival follows the rhythm of the Southern Hemisphere, where the grape harvest falls in February and March rather than the autumn of Europe. It began in 1931, when Colonel Miguel Muratore, then mayor of Caxias do Sul, threw his support behind organizers who wanted a fair for the two products that defined the city above all others: the grape and the wine. The first Festa da Uva opened on March 8, 1931, with grapes and wines displayed in the halls of the Recreio da Juventude club. The idea was practical as much as festive - a chance for farmers to meet, compare notes, and learn techniques to improve their vines and their vintages. It grew out of decades of smaller agro-industrial fairs reaching back to 1881.

From early on, the festival crowned its own royalty. A queen was first chosen in 1933, and the tradition holds today: a Rainha and two Princesas are selected to reign over the celebration. The pageant became one of the festival's signatures, a way of giving the harvest a human face and the city a yearly ritual of pride. Through the parades that wind through Caxias nightly during the Festa, the queen and her princesses preside over a city turned festive - vendors in traditional dress, music in the streets, and the steady current of visitors drawn up into the Serra Gaúcha for a taste of the harvest.

The festival was always more than a market for fruit. When the 50th anniversary of Italian immigration was marked in 1925, the people of Caxias used such occasions to claim their place in the history of Rio Grande do Sul, a history long dominated by Portuguese-descended landowners. The Festa da Uva became their great secular ritual, linking the dignity of Italian labor to the prosperity that labor had built. That is exactly why the war years hurt so deeply. When the descendants of immigrants were forbidden to speak their dialect and pressured to hide their origins, the suspension of the festival was part of a wider silencing. Its revival in 1950, alongside the 75th anniversary of immigration, recast the settlers as pioneers and opened the celebration to all who had built the region together.

Now held every even-numbered year, the Festa da Uva fills the Caxias do Sul pavilions with attractions drawn mainly from South America but reaching out to the wider world. The festival has grown into one of the largest of its kind in the country, drawing close to a million visitors across its run. They move among displays of cheese, grapes, and Brazilian wines, sampling the products of a wine country the immigrants planted from nearly nothing. The exhibition park even holds a replica of old colonial Caxias, a built memory of where it all began. Independent vendors crowd in to sell goods themed to the gaúcho south, and the nightly parades keep the streets alive. It remains a celebration of Italian heritage in its bones - the harvest that once nearly broke the first settlers transformed into the festival that now defines their descendants' city, held openly and proudly in a country that once told them to be quiet.