The ‘lost and regained’ in inner areas: changing farming practices and land use in the ‘organic’ upper Vara Valley

This thesis is a municipal doctorate (‘dottorato comunale’) funded by the National Strategy for Inner Areas (SNAI), a government initiative aimed at developing strategies to mitigate the socio-environmental vulnerability of Italian inner areas affected by depopulation and land abandonment. It seeks to overturn the welfarist approach of past policies by focusing on the needs of local communities. The research explores a Ligurian valley that serves as a particularly significant case study, for three main reasons: the depopulation of the valley, which began at the end of nineteenth century and intensified after the Second World War; recent programmes carried out by national politics and local administrations to reverse this trend, attract tourists, and revitalise the territory; the extensive body of literature that has examined the valley over the past forty years from the perspective of historical ecology. The study area comprises the seven municipalities of the upper Vara Valley, in the province of La Spezia: Varese Ligure, Maissana, Carro, Carrodano, Sesta Godano, Zignago and Rocchetta di Vara. These municipalities are classified by the SNAI as peripheral (Maissana and Varese Ligure) and intermediate (Carro, Sesta Godano, Zignago, Rocchetta di Vara) inner areas or belt municipalities (Carrodano). By 2013, these municipalities have also been part of the Biodistretto Val di Vara ‘Valle del Biologico’ (the ‘Organic Valley’ Biodistrict), an organisation dedicated to promoting organic farming, continuing the ‘organic shift’ initiated by local administrations in the late 1990s by securing European Union funding. The research aims to provide new insights within the critical literature by intertwining national and international debates on inner and peripheral areas, historical ecology, landscape transformation and agri-food supply chains. The thesis primarily aims to connect Italian debates on inner areas and the SNAI framework with the traditions of historical ecology and historical geography, reflecting the observation that contemporary policy approaches often fail to engage adequately with the long-term historical production of landscapes and local ecological knowledge. This multi-purpose study uses a methodology that combines different methods and sources, both quantitative and qualitative. These include progressive cartographic comparison to quantify land-use changes over time, analysis of statistical data on population trends, the use of cadastral maps to observe transformations of rural centres and to recover dialectal micro-toponymy. Furthermore, the use of visual sources and rephotography – using both old postcards and photographs taken in the last thirty years during University of Nottingham field courses –, and of literary travel sources was essential for the historical analysis and contextualisation of social and landscape transformations. Finally, the core of the research adopted an ethnographic approach, crucial for obtaining a detailed picture of abandonment processes, changes in practices and to implement new initiatives by and for the people who decide to remain in this Apennine inner area. This was carried out using the Participatory Action Research (PAR) methodology and a large number of semi-structured or unstructured interviews – in the form of oral histories – with 6 institutional actors, 87 farmers and residents – 27 investigated farms –, and 9 representatives of local cultural or trade associations. The interviews were conducted in Italian or in the local language, a Ligurian dialect. The thesis is structured into three main research chapters. Chapter 3 examines land-use transformations and social changes in the Vara Valley encompassing: 17th- to 20th-century travel literature, including underexplored French travellers diaries and the 19th-century scientific journeys of Domenico Viviani; historical postcards – from the 1920s to the 1980s – and photographs analysed through rephotography to investigate site-scale transformations; and progressive cartographic comparison woodland and agricultural surfaces from 1936 to 2019. Chapters 4 and 5 are based on the interviews and are organised according to the main themes explored. These topics are discussed through the narrative device of ‘stories’ – the telling of the history of a family, a farm, or a community. Chapter 4 focuses on past practices, pastoral life and place names in Mount Verruga – an important summit in the municipality of Maissana –, urban transformations of coastal and mountain centres during rural exodus, and knowledge and practices regarding chestnut trees. Chapter 5 explores the new landscapes that contemporary farming in the upper Vara Valley is creating: young and female agricultural entrepreneurship; organic dairy and meat supply chains, organised around two cooperatives; (non-)organic fruit and vegetable supply chain and its climate change adaptation; neo-ruralism and agritourism. Together, these two chapters illustrate different family trajectories of depopulation and repopulation. Finally, the conclusions summarise the results and discuss the implementation of new strategies to combat depopulation which emerged from the needs of the farmers and residents interviewed.