“I marked out a path that led me back into nature, no longer as spectator but as full-fledged participant.”
Wendell Berry in Bringing It to the Table: On Farming and Food
In the beginning it was not easy at all. Luca worked as a graphic designer in a printing shop and Barbara, beside her job, had to look after three young children. Time never seemed to be enough.
“In 2014 we had already planted 2 hectares and dedicated every weekend and every hour of our spare time to it. It appeared not to be enough anyway. Planting and taking care of a vineyard is a choice which changes your life, as a matter of fact it is like being married."
After years working in front of a computer screen, Luca decided it was important to do something with his hands, something real, something handcrafted that wasn’t just moving a mouse.
That is why in 2016 Luca resigned from the typography to devote all the necessary time and energy to the vineyard. He had just started planning the cellar when the 2016 earthquake froze time and our plans. Going back was out of question: all we could do was to roll up our sleeves.
"We decided that a steel structure would be flexible and safe enough to build our cellar and start producing our wine.
The cellar is the result of the work of my father Stefano, a blacksmith by profession like my grandfather".
At first Stefano was very reluctant, he didn’t feel up to it. His doubts vanished when Luca told him “One day your grandchildren will proudly say ‘My grandfather built our cellar'” and he accepted the challenge.
"We believe that real life is outside surrounded by nature with a constant eye to the respect of the others.
The vineyards are around the house where we live so we try to pollute as little as possible, our trace on earth must be in harmony with it, almost imperceptible."
The return to country life, although harder, puts you back in touch with true values and the concreteness of life.
The human soul is increasingly materialistic and crushed on production and consumption; we are getting dry. It is increasingly difficult to try to educate children to respect themselves and the surrounding nature, it is difficult to find good examples.
Choosing organic agriculture a long time ago and biodynamics today is a necessity: working together with living nature, feeling part of something bigger that "contains and sustains us", trying to leave a better world to future generations, richer and more human.
Emancipating ourselves from the cycles of seasons and from nature disguises to us the danger and disorientation of modern life inside silicon tunnels which in the end are not real, it is a great illusion, a coat of paint on a world which calls us and needs our help or at least needs our passage to be as light as possible on it.
Casa Lucciola is our dream to build an oasis of peace among the chaos of modern leaving.
The demonstration that you can live simply and have a deeply full life, produce food and wine with respect for the place and the people who live there.