I, in my turn, was locked up indoors reading a paper I didn’t even understand Overnight, I decided to give up my PhD, and spent the next few months figuring out what I could do instead. That call for proposals seemed to have just found me”

Eric Steinbruck

The soundtrack to Eric’s story is the chirping of cicadas. Eric arrived in Upacchi, in the Alta Valtiberina valley, where his organic farm is now based, in 1999. He had just turned 13. “After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, my parents, finally free to leave East Germany, decided to cross Europe in search of an ecovillage to live in. In our home country, they had been among the pioneers of the organic movement. We got here for the first time in 1994 and then kept coming for our holidays until a house became available”. Located just a few kilometres from Anghiari (Arezzo), Upacchi is a community that was abandoned in the 1950s and came back to life in the early 1990s: some 20 houses and a spring in the middle of the woods.

When Eric arrived, around 50 people lived there: “Half of them were children, which is also why my sister and I settled in so easily: we started school immediately and learnt Italian in six months”, he says. In 2018, Eric opened Pontepietra: the name is a translation into Italian of his German surname, Steinbruck, as well as a tribute to his parents, who called Casa Pontepietra the business they started after moving to Tuscany. “They grew officinal herbs, as I do now – something that always fascinated me, so much so that during my school and then my university years I always helped them out”, he explains.