Claudio now lives close by
For a few weeks now I have been living in the village, five minutes from Colgrande. Every morning I go down to Colgrande and stay eight, sometimes ten hours. I cut brambles, clear rubble, move stones and metal sheets, and open paths no one had walked in fifteen years.
The work is simple and slow. One metre at a time, the Borgo shows its shape again: a wall nobody remembered anymore, a threshold, the corner of a courtyard. We are not building it, we are finding it again.
September gave us a gift: days of rare, clear light. Tuscia on one side, Umbria on the other, sharp all the way to the horizon.
There are moments when I stop, back straight and hands on the hoe handle. I look. I smile. Then I start again.
The first calluses have come. Anna Maria tends them in the evening, and we still laugh: they are one of Colgrande’s first products.
We have also decided to reconnect to the electricity grid, as a backup alongside the sun, the generator and firewood. As many energy sources as possible, less dependence on any one of them: for us, tomorrow’s resilience matters more than today’s idealistic purity.
The next step is the internal road that climbs up to the Borgo. We’ll tell you about it soon.