A journey to Costa Vescovato, in the Tortonese hills, to understand how resistance to the decline of inner areas is built through agriculture, hospitality and culture.
Ganna Kovalyuk had dreamed since childhood of opening a grocery shop in Khmelnytskyi, the city where she was born and raised in Ukraine. While still a teenager she helped out in a shop in the town, and sooner or later she had wanted to run one of her own. When, about twenty years ago, she moved to Costa Vescovato, a tiny village nestled in the Tortonese hills in the province of Alessandria, she began working as a carer. She then took over the village's small grocery shop, realising her dream.
"The owner wanted to give it up and I understood it was a sign of destiny. My moment had come," she says today, at 50 years old, from behind the counter, covered with local products and nods to nearby Liguria, like a tray of very oily focaccia. "It was harder than expected. There were very few customers; around here there was nobody." For several years Ganna had to work two jobs to earn a sustainable wage. In the mornings she kept the grocery shop open; in the afternoons she continued working as a carer. "At a certain point, after Covid-19, I thought about closing the shop. But then La Campeggia opened and things changed."
In 2023, at the bottom of the slope running alongside Ganna's shop, two young men and a young woman originally from Milan and Bergamo took over management of the abandoned municipal campsite. In a short time the space established itself as a destination for tourists, but also as a centre for cultural events focused on social and environmental sustainability and as a place of connection between visitors and the local community. It is no coincidence that La Campeggia was born right there, in Costa Vescovato. While on one hand the village has found itself at the epicentre of rural depopulation in recent decades, on the other it has seen the emergence of a series of unique agricultural and social initiatives. United by a community spirit, these initiatives have restored appeal to an almost forgotten territory without distorting it. Today Costa Vescovato, amid its many difficulties, is a village worth watching to understand how one resists the decline of inner areas.
The roads of Costa Vescovato wind between rows of vineyards, wheat fields and patches of woodland. Every so often a handful of houses appears, a good many of them empty. The village has depopulated over the decades: today there are 315 residents, though in practice there are fewer, as many have kept their registered address there while living elsewhere. Road signs display the names of numerous wine producers, as if the vintners here outnumber the inhabitants. The economy of the Tortonese hills is based on agriculture and, in particular, on wine — with the rediscovery at the end of the 1990s, thanks to winemaker Walter Massa, of Timorasso, a native white-berry grape now among the most prized in the world. This created a certain food and wine buzz in the area, with dedicated events and festivals promoted by the Consorzio di Tutela Vini Colli Tortonesi that over time attracted ever more visitors. Isolated peaks on specific dates, outside of which the territory continued to suffer from poor services and neglect.
Rishi Gabriele Makkar, Filippo Bertolina and Federica Marie Carenini worked for years in the events sector, based in Milan. In 2020 the Covid-19 pandemic had a profound impact on their work, leading them to explore new professional and geographical horizons. They knew little to nothing about the Tortonese hills, but through a network of contacts and word of mouth they learned that there was an opportunity to take over an old club. In their early thirties, their bet was to relocate to Italy's inner areas and create a gathering place and a cultural offering that would give local residents a reason to stay and those living far away a reason to come.
In the end the takeover of the club fell through, but another opportunity arose. "There was this municipal campsite in Costa Vescovato. We realised we could do there what we had wanted to do in the club. We said to ourselves: let's give it a try," Rishi recalls today. Through their social enterprise Tresca they won the tender to manage the space, and so in the summer of 2023 La Campeggia was born — something innovative for the Tortonese hills and for the Italian scene alike. "La Campeggia is a social campsite, a place of encounter and socialising for travellers and for people who live in the area," explains Filippo. "It aims to allow the outside world to discover the beauty and distinctiveness of this territory, while at the same time generating new relationships and opportunities for the local community."
La Campeggia attracts not only vans and tents from tourists, mostly from France and northern Europe. Local residents come here to enjoy a swim in the panoramic pool and to lend a hand in the community vegetable gardens, and people from all over Italy come for the events, festivals and shows that fill this space's cultural programme every month. Over time there have been winter gatherings beneath a yurt pitched in the snow, harvest festivals, workshops for adults and children, and theatrical performances. One of the most recent festivals was Sooolstizio, a two-day event at which the three-year project "Collab – Laboratorio in collina" was also announced, focused on the transformation of green areas and raising public awareness of environmental protection, in collaboration with the Università di Genova. Recently, Rishi, Filippo and Federica have been attending a series of meetings on energy communities, to learn more about them. What they would like to do is pool their solar panels with others in Costa Vescovato.
La Campeggia sees a great deal of activity. There are the three partners who run the space, friends who come to help at the bar and tend the land, and volunteers arriving from abroad. For the past few weeks it has been the turn of a young man from Wales; next will come a group of young women from Northern Ireland. From summer 2025 there is also the first paid employee. "For this season we decided to take on a girl who comes from right here, from the Tortonese hills," explains Rishi. "It was a bold choice, perhaps a little premature from an economic standpoint, but necessary for the meaning of our project. We want La Campeggia to have an impact on the local community, in employment terms too."
Filippo Bertolina, one of La Campeggia's three partners, joined the village council last year. The list he stood on, led by the incumbent mayor Ottavio Rube, won by just seven votes, and like him, the deputy mayor was also not a local. A narrow victory that, while on one hand it reflects a degree of loyalty from local residents towards those who bring ideas and projects from elsewhere, on the other shows that a certain wariness persists. "People who come from outside and try to do something for the territory often struggle to be accepted by the local community, especially in places as unaccustomed to it as this one. Yet very often the result is opportunities that benefit everyone," explains the mayor. "The truth is that projects like La Campeggia are a breath of fresh air for a small village like Costa Vescovato, which for decades has endured all the hardships of Italy's inner areas, left out of any kind of planning at national level."
In early July the Meloni government, in the new Strategic Plan dedicated to inner areas, wrote that some of these areas cannot set themselves any goal of reversing the trend and need a targeted plan to accompany them through a process of chronic decline and ageing. A kind of surrender to decay — but in Costa Vescovato, the thinking is different.
Mayor Ottavio Rube knows the social and cultural energy of spaces like La Campeggia well. In some ways, he helped inspire it — or at least helped make the municipal land fertile ground for initiatives of this kind. Rube is one of the founding farmers who, in the 1970s, established Valli Unite, an agricultural cooperative that today overlooks the village from its highest hill. The idea was to pool resources and respective landholdings with other local farmers, giving rise to one of Italy's first forms of community organic farming. Today Valli Unite manages 100 hectares of land spanning vineyards, vegetable gardens, cereal crops and pastures, with around 30 families involved and a continuous turnover of people — especially from abroad — drawn by an approach to farming that is both alternative and deeply sustainable.
"We used to be dreamers, thinking that in our small way we could change the world. Today we settle for trying to change things at a micro-local level, and that's no small thing," Rube says today when asked about the importance for the area of smaller projects inspired by similar ideals — like La Campeggia — compared to Valli Unite.
A few kilometres from Costa Vescovato, in the neighbouring village of Carezzano, a small agricultural community lives in a large farmhouse, sharing work, financial resources and living spaces. Umaia was born from a group of people who decided to change their lives, moving from Milano to the Tortonese hills to practise sustainable farming. Today it is home to nine people — five adults and four children — but many more pass through the farmhouse: friends who lend a hand in the fields, volunteers who come from abroad for short stints, and those who lived there for a while before moving on to other projects.
"I was working for a US pharmaceutical company and at a certain point I started to feel suffocated. I wasn't learning anything, there was a waste of money and food — I was in the wrong place and I had a kind of rejection reaction. Choosing to dedicate myself to farming was a political choice, against the world I was living in and the lifestyle I was leading," says Felicia, 45, one of the driving forces behind Umaia, over a glass of wine. She decided to move to the Tortonese hills after a bicycle trip that took her to Valli Unite, where she was struck by the warmth of the welcome, the strength of the political project and the cooperative way of working.
Umaia pursues an idea of simple living. "We focus on the things that can make human beings better — manual work, simplicity and community," Felicia continues. Food is mostly the result of self-production, with an emphasis on sustainable crops that do not require excessive water consumption. Income comes from the production of wine — strictly natural — and from cereals. It is not divided among the members but pooled into a communal fund. At Umaia there are no salaries, and even those with jobs outside — such as Caterina, 30, who holds a degree in Enology and works at Valli Unite — choose to pay their wages into the shared fund. The collective resources are used for all community expenses, from transport to nappies for the children, from healthcare to entertainment, while keeping waste firmly at bay.
Among Umaia's expenses is the fee for the children at Green Days, the forest nursery school run by Talea Aps, located just a few metres from La Campeggia in Costa Vescovato. It is an educational project welcoming children between the ages of 2 and 6. Rather than sitting in a classroom doing theoretical lessons, the children spend their time in nature, with an emphasis on hands-on activities inspired by forest pedagogy and child autonomy. The last year saw as many as 14 pupils — a small miracle for an inner area like Costa Vescovato, where depopulation and falling birth rates go hand in hand. It is a sign of an intergenerational vitality in the village, stretching from the oldest residents down to the youngest children, who are considered equal protagonists alongside adults in the resistance of this territory.
At the end of July, Costa Vescovato will host the fifth edition of the Voci dei Boschi Film Festival, an international festival on farming and the environment. A distributed event with multiple venues — from La Campeggia to the forest nursery, from Ganna's grocery shop to Valli Unite — featuring screenings, exhibitions and activities for all ages. This year's festival is dedicated to the theme of marginal areas as places of possible encounters and continuous exchange, hybridisation and experimentation. A manifesto that reads like the perfect summary of what Costa Vescovato is today and of the realities that animate it — realities that have chosen not to surrender to decline, but to resist and breathe new life into inner areas through a communal and collective ritual.