If I hadn’t taken part in the “on campus” course ReStartAlp, I would never have been able to devote myself full time to the project. Discussing and sharing with competent people enabled me to further develop my ideas”

Giovanni Trapani

Cascina Zan rises at the end of a white road that slopes down for 1.5 kilometres. Giovanni Trapani is a young man from Turin who fell in love with the Alta Langa – a wild, scarcely inhabited area in the Piedmont region. He settled in the hills between Paroldo and Murazzano, in the province of Cuneo, after winning the 2017 Terre Originali Call for Proposals targeted at “young farmers in the Langhe” Terre Originali «per i giovani agricoltori delle Langhe».
This project – promoted by the farmers of the Langhe (Contadini delle Langhe), the Municipality of Clavesana, the Gastronomic Science University, Comizio Agrario di Mondovì, and Make a Cube – was aimed at promoting the interaction between the owners of fallow or abandoned plots of land and young farming entrepreneurs . “Public entities and private citizens have made available land they could no longer care for. Applicants had to submit a project aiming at bringing these lands back to life. The winner was entitled to choose the plot that best suited their project. I won the Call and I chose this one”.

At Cascina Zan, Giovanni found thirteen hectares of land, including pastures, woods and arable land. The owner is Roberta Ferraris, an environmental tour guide who has been working on sustainable tourism since 1994. Roberta also collaborates with various publishers, and she is the author of guides for which she provides texts, photos, and watercolour illustrations. She arrived at the farmhouse in the early 2000s and for seven years she raised goats and made cheese. “Many people simply cannot grasp the beauty and value of the landscape and of this area. It’s a closed, harsh area, where some even hardly allow to collect wood in the abandoned forests” says Roberta. She, a new settler herself – “an outsider” – welcomed Giovanni and his project, which in 2018 led him to participate in the ReStartAlp “on campus” course organised by Fondazione Edoardo Garrone and Fondazione Cariplo.