Valle degli Elfi

Number of inhabitants: about 150, with seasonal variations
Year of foundation: 1980
Extension: 3 valleys, 15 nuclei + scattered settlements

Project characteristics: Widespread community

Arriving in the Valle degli Elfi will mean entering a territory inhabited by a real People who have the courage, the audacity, the madness and the creativity to have settled in houses, farmhouses and districts abandoned for decades, perhaps even longer.

The People of the Elves arrived here one by one, attracted by a call, by a philosophy, by common knowledge, by a journey away from urban contexts towards a new way of living in simplicity, where time expands, where haste makes no sense, where the seasons and nature, powerful, inspire the steps of man and his actions.

Days marked by simple, anarchic, different and similar rites. Smiles, thick beards, colorful clothes brought from distant journeys. Everyone is welcome in a particular way but no one is left out of the house: you can always add a guest to the table!

Fire, stove, woods, chestnut trees, Tibetan flags that emerge from the thick of the bush, drums in the woods, yurts, goats, cows and cheeses, an almost food self-sufficiency for some groups. The snow in winter, as deep as only in the Apennines now. Circles around the fire, the Moon Festival, in which all the groups meet every month, in the brightness of the star, at one of the communities that populate this valley. Groups to reach on foot, in a land where paths dominate over roads, obviously dirt roads.

We will be guests in this territory rich in 40 years of stories, lives, passions and contradictions, of the pulsating experimentation that another way of living is not only possible but has been and is still being realized.