CàNoVa

My name is Claudio. I spent forty years analysing how large organisations use technology. I saw from the inside how outsourcing concentrates power, how financial markets have disconnected from the real economy, how digitalisation can liberate or enslave — and often does both at the same time.

In 2013 I wrote a handbook on digital ethics that opened with a scene set in 2050: the last human beings, on an orbiting station, looking at a deserted Earth and asking themselves: "Was another ending possible?" It was not science fiction. It was a projection of the data I had before me.

Anna Maria, my partner and adventure companion, devoted forty years to caring for people — as a flight rescue nurse in Lazio, in the operating room, in elderly care, as a Red Cross volunteer. Her experience of the limits of the human body, of illness and recovery, is the concrete counterpoint to my analysis of the systems that have broken them.

The system we have built in the West — extractive capitalism, creative finance, hollowed-out democracies, violated nature — has produced efficiency and profound loneliness. It has multiplied goods and impoverished relationships. It has connected the planet and isolated people.

We all know this. But knowing, and protesting, is not enough. The time has come to build what we want.

During the week of 21 December 2012 — the winter solstice, my birthday — my consciousness received what I can only call an unexpected gift. Unsought, unplanned. I began to see the world differently. I cannot explain it better than that.

What followed were fifteen years of walking — inward and outward. Meditation, shamanism, Peru, ancient rites. And physical walking: five thousand kilometres on foot, between Rome and Santiago de Compostela and along the Via Francigena.

One step at a time. The mind emptying. The body learning again to trust the earth and others.

In 2023 I retired. I founded Give&Receive APS — a social promotion association that works with Reciprocity as the foundation of human relations and with Marshall Rosenberg's Nonviolent Communication as its method of interaction.

And then, on the first of June 2025, on the last day of my walk along the Francigena, a request arrived. Not from a person. From an oak tree, or from something else that is hard to name.

Buy a piece of woodland and countryside — raped by man — to make Humans and Nature flourish at the same time. An oak, on the Via Francigena

The name we chose for this project is CàNoVa — New Home. But it also carries within it the letters CNV, the Nonviolent Communication that is its founding language. And it evokes Antonio Canova, the sculptor who created Cupid and Psyche: love that, with the gentle breath of a kiss, awakens human consciousness from its sleep.

On the first of January 2026 we were informed of an auction for a large piece of land in Tuscia. After deep reflection together, we made our life choice and won the auction.

Colgrande lies in the heart of the Tiber Valley, between Viterbo and Orvieto. Thirty-eight hectares of fields, ancient oak woodland, olive groves, a large meadow and a small valley abandoned for more than ten years. Three buildings to be restored. Land that waits — and near the house, a great mother oak.

This is what we intend to do with CàNoVa at Colgrande. Not build a holiday farm. Not create a romantic commune. Build a place where land and humans flourish together — because their wounds are, at root, the same wound.

Do you want to flourish at Colgrande together with all of us? We are not looking for people who already have all the answers. We are looking for people who have the right questions and the humility to honour them with practical choices.

Colgrande requires care and work after decades of neglect. Claudio and Anna Maria need one or two years (2026–27) to restructure the borghetto, launch the first horticultural, apiary and social activities, and live there — thriving with the hill.

Together with the first couples and individuals accepted into the project, we will create (2027–28) an Agricultural Cooperative with a prevalently mutual structure, with equal and non-speculative governance — inspired by the French model <a href="https://www.les-pas-sages.org/" target="blank" rel="noopener">Les Pas Sages — now being brought to Italy <a href="https://www.lpsitalia.org" target="blank" rel="noopener">through this parallel community initiative. Each participant (up to about 25 people) brings their own life project, enabled by the shared platform: land, infrastructure, community, network.

We will pursue energy, food and economic self-sufficiency with absolute respect for nature and its cycles.

Agricultural experience is not indispensable but an added value. Only one thing is truly indispensable: a genuine will to live differently, together with others, with NVC and reciprocity as foundations — not as slogans, but as daily practice.

CàNoVa does not mean isolating oneself — neither from the surrounding territory, nor from the society in which we now live, nor from the rest of the world. The project at Colgrande is the founding part of a broader journey.

Every experience that proves this model works — that land comes back to life, that people find fulfilment, that the cooperative is economically sustainable — becomes proof that the process can be replicated elsewhere. In Italy, in Europe, in the world.

Technology will contribute to the flourishing; all steps of the project will be documented and made available to anyone interested in developing a similar experience.

This is not utopia. CàNoVa is a concrete, documented and replicable experiment.