In a tiny, too-bright room that serves as the library of a primary school near Cornale, in the Piedmont region of Italy, three generations of villagers fill the early-summer night with beautiful harmony. Sitting on steel chairs, standing against bookshelves, and leaning on ladders, they sing a 15th-century harvest song accompanied by the plaintive strains of an accordion. A toddler walks among them, and as he settles in beside his mother, the song eases into a tender lullaby.
It’s plain to see who orchestrated the subtle shift. A small but solid woman, Elena Rovera stands out from the crowd. The people in the room strain to catch every one of her exaggerated nods and winks, and they respond in kind to the many emotions that play across her handsome face. Whether discussing her mountain childhood, the folk traditions she so loves, or the young farmers whose survival has become her life’s work, Rovera is nothing if not passionate.
Her energy is contagious. In just a few years, with a combination of tireless devotion, restless creativity, and a Pied Piper’s ability to make converts of people who didn’t even know they were looking for a cause, Rovera has launched a mini-movement that could become a model for the rest of the world.
About 15 years ago, Rovera’s husband, Raffaele, a fifth-generation fruit grower, planted rare varieties of pears and apples on his family’s land—at a time when the market was turning toward bigger, blander fruits grown by conglomerates. One year, wholesalers lowered their prices without warning, and Raffaele was forced to sell his fruit below cost. Another time, a hailstorm blew in just before harvest, and he lost almost all his crop. There was no insurance to speak of. “Imagine writing something for a year,” Rovera says, “working honestly, and then someone lights a match.”
Experiences like Raffaele’s, Rovera says, were why so many of their contemporaries were beginning to renounce the farming life altogether. But that meant as the older generation—the people who grew up knowing in their bones how to tend the pear, apple, and hazelnut trees that had supported the region for centuries—began to die, their knowledge was dying with them. Rovera was sure there were others in the new generation who cared about old varieties of fruits, vegetables, and animals, and who were interested in ecologically responsible methods of farming. But she knew how hard it would be for them to make a living while following those ideals.
So she devised a plan. She retired early from her job as a schoolteacher and used her savings to band together a group of enthusiastic young farmers. The aim of their organization, the Cooperativa Agricola Cornale, would be to insulate one another from the risks inherent in small farming in an increasingly industrial economy. The members would pool their resources to ensure that no one took big risks (or big losses) alone, and they would avoid middlemen by selling their products at a market right on the highway—midway between Alba and Asti, where no touring truffle or Barolo hunter could miss it. In a country where farmers markets hardly existed, that was a radical move in itself.
No faux-rustic boutique passing off industrial foodstuffs behind “handwritten” brown paper labels, the co-op is a meeting place for farmers, cheesemakers, and anyone else interested in honest food. In the Cascina del Cornale Agriturismo, the adjacent restaurant that Rovera opened in 2000, people intrigued by, say, the area’s disappearing sweet red peppers or “hunchback” cardoons can dip them into homemade bagna cauda, the warm emulsion of olive oil, butter, anchovy, and garlic for which the region is famous. They can sit down to a bowl of mines tra, or a rustic plate of chicken cacciatora made with farm-raised birds and accompanied by roasted heirloom potatoes. They can help themselves to local cheeses and eat them with cugnà, the emblematic relish of quince, pear, hazelnuts, walnuts, and cooked-down grape must that every family makes come harvest time. And for dessert, they can sample Raffaele’s pears.
Rovera says the co-op is the kind of place she always dreamed about, but she is nonetheless fraught with worry. She shakes her head in anguish over the account books and frets about the futures of her young adherents, many of whose parents slaved to make sure that their children would amount to something.
Also, leader though she is, Rovera is not always the diplomat. She detests the false and superficial, and she doesn’t hesitate to speak her mind. She is “determined to protect farmers from the theft of little pieces of their soul” by seductive commercial interests. And her innate distrust of large organizations means she’ll look to few for help. Though the headquarters of Slow Food are located just down the road, for example, Rovera faults the organization for taking government and corporate funding, and she has never been a member. She even scorns the local wineries, referring to Piedmont’s many stripped-clean, cement-poled vineyards as “cemeteries,” and the rosebushes on their peripheries (planted, supposedly, to deflect insects) as “a Californian touch that would be funny if it weren’t so painful.”
But Rovera may yet prevail—with help from California. Two years ago, when Alice Waters went to Turin to attend the Salone del Gusto, the biennial Slow Food convention, she made a single detour from the city. The day before she was to lecture hundreds of people on the benefits o f sustainable agriculture, Waters and a party of Chez Panisse cooks chartered a small bus to take them to Cornale.
There, they visited co-op member farms and gathered cartons of organic vegetables to take back with them to the city. They talked with the farmers and engaged in animated conversations with Rovera. And by the end of the afternoon, the two women were making plans for the future.
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