Oltre Il Verde DellaCampagna. Beyond the Countryside Green

In the past century, ethnographers have turned their gaze to the rural West, examining how communities have navigated the challenges of development and modernization (Rhoades, 2005). Italy mirrors this trajectory: once a nation of peasants at the time of unification, and where half the population still depended on agriculture after World War II, it gradually transformed into a nation of workers and city dwellers (Bravo, 2013). This shift resulted in the ruination of the agricultural landscape: a loss and concealment of agricultural history beneath the underbrush (Fontefrancesco, 2024). These verses seek to evoke that landscape through the words and memories of my informants. Fieldwork has been ongoing since 2014 in San Giovanni in Monferrato, a small municipality of just over a thousand people, located in Monferrato, a hilly region between the Po and Tanaro valleys in Alessandria province. Like other neighboring towns, San Giovanni experienced steady depopulation and minimal industrialization during the twentieth century, benefiting only marginally from the economic boom and the emergence of industrial districts. Over the last century, its population has declined to just over 20% of its original size. This demographic collapse has been accompanied by increased commuting and aging, only slightly offset in recent decades by growing but limited tourism (Fontefrancesco, 2025, 31–34). The verses presented here are reworkings of my field diary, transforming narrative sketches into poetic form. They can be read as an impressionist ethnographic vignette (Van Maanen, 2011), where poetic language creates an experimental space (Berlant & Stewart, 2019) that invites a more immersive and affective engagement. The goal is to convey the historical layering and interconnections that shape the rural landscape (Ingold, 2011), highlighting the significance of uncultivated land (Favole, 2024) beyond its romanticized image as an idyllic bucolic space. In doing so, the verses aim to reveal how modernization and globalization have shaped even this seemingly remote and traditional rural corner of Italy (Woods, 2007).