“When we crushed the grapes with our feet, that was the part I liked the most.” This is said by Ambra, ten years old, from the Il cigno school, one of the five institutes of the state educational club 33 Risorgimento of Naples which participated in the educational project Vigna Resilience promoted by the Radici Vive winery, in the area since 1891.
“Instead, it’s up to me to put the labels,” says Carlos, ten, or rather, almost eleven years old, he specifies. “Because I used to live in another country: Peru.”
The first was 2020. March was the month in which the vineyard was planted. But even before that, Vigna Resilience was just one of the many Neapolitan green areas fallen into a state of idle dissolution. The closed gate, the two meter high grass, an undisturbed landfill space for everything “from mattresses to unidentified material”, jokingly says Vincenzo Varchetta who, together with his cousin Cristina, holds the reins of Radici Vive.
The two cousins, however, have taken charge of corners like this, which people just want to forget, and today, three years later, they are giving back to the city of Naples fragments of identity to a territory that is too often anthropized.
In Pianura, right on the outskirts of the city centre, you almost don’t have the sensation of living next to what is “a supervolcano hidden under the sea of gulf of Pozzuoli” – represented by the Campi Flegrei – Matteo, a fifth grade student at the Risorgimento school, is quick to say.
Uprooting, throwing away special waste, reclaiming, and then today seeing healthy Falanghina vines, all arranged between neat rows. This is the project completed by Living Roots.
All made possible because in the usual tangle of dissonant voices of the bureaucracy, this time what prevailed was, instead, a synergistic movement with the institutions: the municipality of Naples, the Superintendency of Archaeology, Fine Arts and Landscape, the municipal districts and the schools. A movement that has become fertile fertilizer to also fuel urban redevelopment.
There are many places in Naples where no one wants to go, then you remove the dirt and you realize that a sense of stubborn beauty it is, instead, in every corner. “Implement projects to build a narrative of the territory” he says the Councilor for Education and Families Maura Striano – like that of Radici Vive “it means combining the possibility of becoming aware of the territory in which one lives and also of its cultural vocation”.
“The objective is to promote new forms of integration and training for young people” he explains Andrea Saggiomopresident of the Pianura Soccavo Municipality, but is also “aimed at creating a bond with its territory”.
A territory, the one in which the vineyard arisesalready marked by the fertility of its land given the presence of a population since the Roman Empire as evidenced by the ancient Roman mausoleum which persists in the vineyard. It has been restored thanks to the Superintendency of Naples.
This is how it has been in these three years Cristina Varchetta who went to visit children in schools, and explained to them what a vineyard is or how wine is made, going through the various phases of harvesting, pressing and pruning. And then it was up to the teachers to delve deeper, continuing the teaching activity directly in the vineyard.
“And in fact we came to prune the vines this year” – says Samuele, who seems to handle even the chemical rudiments of a fermentation process with a certain certainty, and no less, then his companions in explaining how a wine back label compliant with European regulations is created.
Today the first bottles of Falanghina dei Campi Flegrei (pictured in the gallery at the end of the article). With five different labels, all colorful and all with names that recall the evocative and volcanic force of Flegrea: Cuore napoletano falanghina, Meraviglioso Flegreo, Onde di vino, La vite divina and Vinisio. The wine was recently bottled and tastes of awareness, of really doing something good for the future.
