In the countryside of Tuscia, in Viterbo province, there stands a family farm that for four generations has held its ground against the general exodus from rural areas and the exclusive use of machinery. Since 2018, it has become home to Volta la Terra, a network built on sharing, exchange, and reciprocity—one that brings people back from the margins of society. Working the land, people rediscover their worth through tending a territory they approach together with greater care and responsibility. Costanza Mestichelli, 45, runs the operation. She lives here with her husband Filippo Ascenzi and their three children—Giovanni, Marta, and Sabina—and for the past few months, also with Pietro, a seventy-five-year-old man with disabilities, brought here to escape the hardship of a difficult periphery in Rome.
How did this experience begin?
In 2008, when our second child, Marta, was born, we moved here from Rome. It was a significant change, especially for people who might have assumed we'd choose a more conventional life. On my husband Filippo's family farm, there stood an old sheepfold next to two small houses already set up for hospitality. We invested everything we had into it. The sheepfold became our home, with a large welcoming hall to expand the agriturismo's services. Among our first guests were friends from Rome from the Fede e Luce communities, who came for summer camps. Living in community with people with intellectual disabilities taught us a new way of seeing our responsibilities and our commitment. This joined with what we already felt toward this piece of land we've been given the chance to steward—land we hope will bear fruit for us and for the wider community we live in.
But it's not so easy to do it alone…
Small operations like ours don't go very far in today's market. You need a network where everyone brings what they do best to the table. Three years ago, we launched a new social agriculture initiative, partnering with farms IOB, Fattoria Cupidi, Valentini, and Podere La Branda. That's how SolCare was born. Each farm is multifunctional, open to different kinds of production and family situations. Some of us, like our operation, offer garden work—planting, tending, harvesting—or orchards. Others work with animals or bees. Some process our products. Some have tourist accommodations. With the SolCare network, we share organic farming methods, and in the social agriculture projects we develop, we offer different activities for the many local nonprofits working with people with disabilities, or we collaborate on inclusion projects like those we do with Caritas or the Waldensian Church.
There must be many balances to strike—keeping the farm viable while adapting to what each person can do…
Better regulation of the sector will be essential. Some of the mechanisms in how we work with institutional partners could improve. The structures of the parent company help us when we need it. We keep gaining experience, and the encounters are always fruitful. With Ilario and Desiderio, two adults with intellectual disabilities, and their first support worker Armando, we made the idea of a large market garden real—one for selling organic produce. Large, because the yield needs to be enough to make economic sense. But not so large it would overwhelm the people tending it. So I divided it into smaller plots—which also helps with crop rotation—so whoever worked them could see the boundaries and labor at a human scale.
For all this to work, you have to call on civil society to push back against any kind of exclusion.
We start with people usually left at the margins, with land at risk of abandonment, and bring in as many others as we can through conscious, responsible choices. With SolCare, we deliver our produce to Rome, and customers can be even more involved by adopting sections of the garden. These different possibilities let us create new pathways to job inclusion. Adama Traoré, a young man from Mali we met through a Caritas project, started driving our delivery van to Rome—a city that's anything but easy for traffic. Now he's a truck driver for a shipping company.
And Pietro—you didn't leave him at the margins either.
Filippo and I decided to have him stay with us, at least for a few months. With other friends, we realized he couldn't stay at his old place anymore. Here he has company and enjoys the countryside. He helps with small tasks—washing potatoes, picking wild chicory, preparing herbs for delivery. He has a perseverance you have to admire. He joins us at the table with his memories and his opinions, in his likable way. He has his own spaces to smoke his faithful cigar, play with the dogs, or watch television. These past months, when we were all caught up in remote work and distance learning, he gave our days a different rhythm—that same sense of "entrusting" we felt here during Fede e Luce's summer camps. Despite inevitable challenges in managing his daily life, for the whole family his presence has been a real antidote to pandemic stress.