Passeggiando tra i campi una sera d'estate
A summer walking in the countryside
Hallo, my name is Luca Federico Fianchini, but almost all of my old friends know me simply as Luca and this is also the nick-name I used in my earliest internet experience (1999-2003), when I frequently interacted in agricultural web-boards with italian and foreign farmers, to discuss about farming issues.
I like web-interaction between people, so I'm still committed in web-communication about agro-technical issues, mainly by means of my multi-lingual web interface 'Agrolinker', I created in 2002. Agrolinker has allowed me to experience many things about the arts of journalism and extensionism, that is in my mind, the way to make people could easily understand what sometimes looks like an amount of complex and useless scientific issues.
My interest in the agriculture really began in the early '70 years of the last century (I'm 45, at now, 2009) when, like many baby-boomers, I spent part of my summer holidays in the quiet and silent countryside of the Marche region (center-north part of italian peninsula), whose hill-landscape was the stage of my childhood dreams. In this country region, extensive agriculture, practiced with crop rotation in small plots was once the most typical agricultural management practice, making, the marchesan hill-landscape, during the summer, become a multi-color collage.
Looking in the countryside, you could frequently see farmers involved in the crop-cycle practices and cattle management, hear the bovine cattle lowing and, at the sunset, you could smell the milk flavour as it told you: 'take your green bottle and go to the dairy farm'.
During the hot summer nights, staring at the sky, you could easily locate, in the complete darkness, the 'Great Bear' and the other major costellations. All your summer life looked like as turning aroud some daily jobs clearly, showing the country was aroud you and within you.
Unfortunately the economic crisis and the typical loneliness and hard life of the countryman has taken now the most of the young people away from the agricultural management of fields, leaving place to (greener and more omogeneous) pasture and forest lanscapes.
Once, you could notice, the increasing technological progress seemed it could coexist with the natural and traditional country-life, perhaps because the related economic progress didn't need to suggest to countryman any antithetic model of life. I think for this reason people continued during a long time more, considering the country-life as a good opportunity, with respect to the city-life.
At present town people is coming back to the country, but maybe they are looking for something that it is no more there.
The european country people seem now to need the Rural development policies be revised to create local markets, also with locally more targetted AG policies, to permit less developed regions to thrive also in the actual global context and allow, this way, farmers to come back on the hills and agri-touristic promotion of many less developed agricultural districts.
