The Salento of the Paduli who is reborn: “A community pact against the abandonment of the lands and depopulation”

The south who does not expect. That comes back, or remains. Who does not give up the depopulation. Which reacts with fantasy and creativity to the gray of the Xylella which in Salento has devastated an entire landscape killing millions of olive trees within a few years in one of the most terrible vegetable pandemics in the history of all time and comparable to Covid who stopped and brought the world to the knees in 2020.

A south that understood that Without building social ties and trust first, there are no economic development, jobs, good life opportunities. The former are the prerequisite of the latter. Easy to say, yes. The beauty is that it is often done, too. And also very well.

One of these adventures takes us to the heart of Salento, in Park of the Paduli, a platform of community experiences, indeed a “community pact “as he defines it Mauro Lazzari, architect, graduated in Florence and returned to San Cassiano, Borgo of not even two thousand souls a few steps from Otranto from where our journey begins to discover this initiative. Next to Lazzari, president of the Santa Cooperative Santa forge, there is a cohesive and close -knit team as Luca Cosimo Coluccia who studied communication sciences and chose not to leave, and Stefania Semerarowho graduated in Lecce and then abandoned an indeterminate accounting job in a clinic to follow the group also bringing his theatrical knowledge, through which he created participatory practices that made the inhabitants more aware of the process of change in progress.

They, together with others, are the soul and engine of the “Santi Paduli” project, blossomed in 2022, but sown and cultivated many years earlier, with a handful of brave who has returned here or has decided not to leave, the result of a patient weaving of meetings, ties, ideas to make the fields (and people) resilient. A project married by Foundation with the South, born in 2006 with the aim of promoting social cohesion and development in the South, which accompanied and financed him with 2.7 million euros because, as the president explains Stefano Council“It is perfectly in line with our action plan for the next three years that it identifies in contrast to the depopulation of the South, and therefore in the demographic and social” regeneration “of the communities, the strategic objective of the interventions, favoring initiatives such as this born in the area”.

If in the rest of Puglia we run away from the countryside, in this reality characterized by a small rural economy it is proposed, in a pragmatic way, An idea of ​​community that strengthens the connection with the earth, starting from agriculture, and the identity of the territory.

A process that has had its own Culmination in the summer of last year with the “parades and banquets of the Gentile rebellion”, With which the comparison between the various subjects involved in the project has come alive: public administrations, associations, companies, farmers, cooks and operators, quality controls, parents, children and teachers.

The Paduli Agricultural Park is an area of ​​5,500 hectares in the province of Lecce, which falls into eight small municipalities, each with less than two thousand inhabitants: Botrugno, Giuggianello, Muro Leccese, Nociglia, Sanarica, San Cassiano, Supersano and Surano who got together in theUnion of Municipalities of the Terre di Mezzo.

A varied landscape dotted not only by olive trees (destroyed, and now replanted in a rebirth that is long and tiring) but also woods, farms, trulli, rock churches with wonderful Byzantine frescoes, as evidenced by the splendid Crypt of the Madonna della Consolazione Of the year one thousand who is located in the center of San Cassiano, Dolmen, Menhir but also knowledge, traditions, ways of cultivating the earth.

«We were taken for granted that the olive trees never die and instead we found ourselves faced with a devastation without appeal. Only a landscape to be completely reconstructed from scratch », says Lazzari. Behind the idea of ​​the park, to be reconstructed and made again alive, beautiful, animated, cultivated there is the LUA association (open urban laboratory), Composed precisely by Lazzari and the other young local professionals, who since 2003 has started the agricultural recovery process of the territory by acquiring land, in part, donated by local administrations or by now distant owners, in part, purchased as they show the public olive grove and the Bosco del Park, Examples of intelligent landscape regeneration.

Everyone has put their own in terms of creativity, ideas, intuitions. Starting with the institutions. “We understood immediately,” says the mayor of San Cassiano, Oronzo Lazzari, «That if there was to bet on these territories we could not do it individually. We created a union of municipalities, to face challenges that concerned our realities indiscriminately. All administrators signed this path. And for now it has been a won bet ».

The farms of the area also got involved, as he says Giuseppe Agrosì, Entrepreneur of Supersano, who is moved as he tells the devastation of Xylella: «The moment when I understood that all of us Salento were now addicted to the gray of the countryside was when my three children at school had designed an olive grove. The trees, however, were bare, without branches and without branches, and gray in color. That landscape had entered our collective imagination, in our unconscious».

Agrosì, together with his wife Monica Torsello, decided not to emigrate and rolled up his sleeves once again, planting new olive trees, cultivated in aridoculture (which does not provide for artificial irrigation, but relies on the ability of the soil to retain humidity), finishing the wooded area around his company which has also become a teaching forest Where school children can “study” biodiversity and, this year finally, returning to producing oil after dramatic years: “We are working with agronomists and researchers because it is not just about saving plants, but of reconstructing an ecosystem”, he explains, “and to do so they need knowledge and patience. We have to bring the green back where it was usurped by all this gray».

As the municipalities have set together, the entrepreneurs have also decided to network and today his company is part of the “Santi Paduli” project together with other twelve companies. Its oil together with fruit, vegetables, pasta and other products from these companies ends every day in the school canteens of the seven municipalities concerned: a short chain that generates widespread economy and teaches the over 350 students served, And their parents, respect for biodiversity and seasonality. The project has already offered new opportunities to the farmers who participate and will create in everything 31 jobs, 30% intended for people with fragility.

Employees will be employed in the activities that the two cooperatives established for this purpose are managing: canteens and school kitchens; theSocial Osteria recently inaugurated in Surano (and where in the menu you can see the origin of the individual products); theOpificio of the minor fruits of NoCigliaa former deposit recovered and converted, where the fruits excluded from large retailers are transformed and valued; Logistics and new accommodation services, for slow and sustainable tourism.

Among the stories of entrepreneurs stand out those of Gabriele Pirelli who returned to “home”, after his studies in Bocconi in Milan and a career in agri -food exports in Luxembourg, to found an artisan pasta factory in Ruffano that enhances the local products, paying them the right and taking on the risk of the “major costs of the supply chain, from the selection of the seed to packaging”. Or that of Giacomo Cavalera, 32 years old, who returned from Bologna after studying in letters to create an association of social agriculture he called “Sowings” With the aim of bringing young people back to regain possession of the countryside and cultivating them: “We teach how to make a vegetable garden in arid culture, to resume old knowledge to adapt them to new types of agriculture, to regain possession of that sociability and mutual aid between peasants who were in the countryside of the past”, he says, “the relationship with Santi Paduli was born from the need for a constant supply of food for the canteen. We provide twice a week seasonal products and the children’s menu also changes according to the availability of seasonal products ».

The future is to go on and make the project walk on your legs, as underlined Marco Imperiale, General Manager of Foundation with the South: «We saw that there was a proactive momentum that started from below, by the people who are generally those who have the greatest interest in taking care of their territory. We are sure that at the end of our work the project will be very good to go on independently ».