Wild learning in Italy

Written By Jay Tompt

I began composing this wild dispatch in my head from the too-wild but still orderly rows of grape vines at my friend, Alex’s, Tuscan farm, which mainly produces artisan olive oil and happy memories for the people who visit. We’re here in the off season, launching ourselves into today’s good work of pruning the vineyard’s 80 or so vines. The sky is blue. The sun is bright. The kids are yelling and laughing. Alex is mowing. There’s a little birdsong and insect buzz if you listen. We’ll have lunch, soon. My attention wanders, returns to the secateurs in my hand and snaggle of vines to be tamed. Sinking into this work, the reflections come.

I was invited to participate and speak at the Mediterranean Diet Feeds the Future Global Summit, organised by the Future Food Institute. I had met founder, Sara Roversi, a few years ago on a virtual panel at a small Japanese conference, which was held in a small rural town not unlike Totnes, where I’m based, or Pollica, where Sara’s organisation has an outpost. We stayed in touch. Then, her colleague, Virginia invited me to speak on a short course they were running in Tokyo (where they have another outpost.) And through these relationships my invitation came.

My partner, Jane, demonstrating her pruning technique.

The Mediterranean Diet is more than what I had assumed – olive oil, vegetables, fish, and red wine. It is these food stuffs, but it’s more. It’s a pattern of living to be found in many places around the Mediterranean, which includes healthy soils, nutritious food and drink in moderation, and enjoying all of it with family and friends. Meals are given the time they deserve. This pattern embraces friendship and conviviality, local production for local consumption, and care for the community. This is what the Future Food Institute has been working to understand and amplify in their Paideia Campus in Pollica. The mayor here is a productive actor in this regard, as well, and when students come here they see what a regenerative movement on the ground looks, feels and tastes like.

My humble contribution was to share some of the ideas that have captured our attention at Schumacher College – holistic education, systems and complexity, bioregionalism and relocalisation, interconnectedness, and putting life at the centre of the inquiry and practice of economic transformation. The future is open and we have agency. All of these ideas are aligned with the work that goes on here at Paideia – a word that comes from the ancient Greek, by the way, which means something like educating the whole person to become a virtuous member of the community.

Sara explaining some aspects of soil science while visiting La Petrosa, a regenerative farm in the area.

Part of our wild experiment for the next year is to inquire into the idea of education in these times. This world seems to be crumbling beneath our feet, making way for the new world our hearts know is possible, perhaps. But the future is open. What can we make of it? How can educators be of service? And what kind of education, knowledge, and knowhow might the makers and shapers of future worlds need to bolster and free their agency? I asked some of the young people at this conference what they thought. Practical, experiential learning and empathy, they said. ‘How can we learn to communicate so we can be understood, so we can connect and reach people?’

With this experience in mind, we left for Tuscany and Montepaldi, an amazing opportunity to model holistic agroecological-led economic change on a 350 hectare estate once owned by the Medicis and Corsinis. The Future Food Institute is grasping it, having taken it on only a few weeks ago. The sweet poetic irony, hundreds of years in the making, that this place could be the epicentre of a new life affirming ‘renaissance’, was pointed out by our guide, Lorenzo. That this echoes a similar situation in our own neighbourhood, is also apparent – a double irony still unfolding, perhaps.

With estate lands in the background, Lorenzo sharies some history of Montepaldi with Alex, Jane, and me.

And so, my thoughts here amongst Alex’s olive trees and vines naturally to turn to collaborative possibilities. Could we run courses here in the coming year? Prototype new models for learning – for our students and faculty, as well as for theirs? I’m finding that my reflections while pruning are a kind of prototype, too. Wild.