The Tuscan farm keeping ancient grains alive

The —— collector

Barbara is half German, half Italian, and grew up in motion. Her parents drove a van across Syria, Egypt, Turkey, Germany and Iran, and she came back from each trip with seeds to germinate at home. It is the kind of habit that doesn't read as a habit until you're fifty and your fields are full of it.

For years she worked at an employment centre in Prato, the textile city north-west of Florence. When the 2008 crisis hit, she was running three offices, finding work for people the mills had let go - retraining, outplacement, the slow business of starting people over again.

What moved the family out of the city was the children. Having them drew Barbara and her husband toward what she calls "a new dimension," the wish to raise them with fields to walk into. Saverio is a doctor in Florence. He grew up there but spent his summers on the family farm among the vines and olives, and he knew his way around a tractor and a long day. Between them they had their current city life and the memory of a rural one.

Two years —— studying

They looked at something like a hundred houses before this one. Podere Montisi sits in Travalle, in the hills between Florence and Prato - which was the point: midway between Saverio's hospital in one city and Barbara's work and the children's school in the other.

The farmhouse is Medici-era, built in the 1500s, though they suspect it might be even far older. They found windows inside the house, walled in - signs that the building had grown in stages over centuries. The land has been documented since the 1200s, held by the Pieve di Santa Maria in Travalle. Part of the complex was likely a convent once, where they spun silk and linen; two old mulberry trees and a few wild flax plants in the fields are what's left of it.

Before they touched the building, they had been studying it for two years: bioarchitecture, old techniques, how to bring the house back without spending a fortune and without erasing it. They asked the village's older people how the house had been put together in the first place. The work itself was done by two men. New roofs, new walls, new floors. Natural clay on the walls instead of tiles, even in the kitchen, finished with plain soap; lime plaster, egg paint, casein; terracotta and pale stone underfoot. Heat comes from a pellet-and-wood system fed by their own woodland. Solar panels cover the electricity. Rain off every roof is caught and run back into the vegetable garden. They moved in around 2008.

The —— wheat

When the neighbouring land came free - six hectares of olive trees with hay between the rows - they decided to grow grain. The reasoning was domestic: an Italian family lives on bread and pasta.

So they started volunteering with geneticists at the University of Florence who were tracking down old grain varieties on half-forgotten farms. Since 2012 Barbara has gone every year to a gathering of grain people from across Europe - bakers and farmers who care about sourdough and proper pasta. The fields around Podere Montisi have a unique evolutive population of two thousand soft-wheat varieties mixed together. The idea is that the field sorts itself - the varieties that suit the soil and the season pull ahead, year on year, and the whole population adapts to a climate that won't sit still. Barbara and her family also mill their own flour on the farm and bake from it. Only four farms in the area make bread from grain like this. You would struggle to find it anywhere else in the world.

The olives came with the place, and with the town - Travalle's oil is what the area is known for. The grain grows in the rows between them, the way it used to be done in ancient times. Barbara runs pruning courses for people who have "adopted" a tree, she tells us how she recently spent a morning teaching a honeymooning couple how to prune across trees of two, three, eighty and a hundred years. They press their own oil and it leaves the farm under its own name, as does the flour.

The newest project is the pollinators. Thirty wild-bee hotels are going up across the farm, and they planted five hundred berry bushes - raspberries, blueberries, blackberries - chosen to flower in a staggered way so that something is always in bloom for the bees.

The —— rooms

The family's side of the house are the old farmer's quarters. Downstairs, a living room and kitchen open onto the garden - pale stone floors, a round table for five, shelves of cookbooks and language books. Upstairs there are two bedrooms: Cipresso, with cypress-wood floors and a window into the cypress trees themselves, and Capperi, the double, with a terracotta floor and caper flowers growing along the wall just outside. Between them, a small landing of books in several languages, for guests who didn't bring their own. There is no television.

Guests arrive to a welcome of Barbara’s own jam, herb salt, oil and bread, gluten-free if you need it, and each following day there's a small thing left for you: a little bottle of oil, another jar. She runs nearly all of it alone, in the fields by day and at the laundry until late in the night.

The farm sits on the Via di San Jacopo in Toscana, the old pilgrim road that ran from Florence down to the coast, where walkers once took ship for Barcelona and the Camino. Pilgrims still come through, and Barbara welcomes them with open arms. She runs olive pruning courses and lets people "adopt" one of her olive trees. She tells us how she just spent a morning teaching a honeymooning couple how to prune across trees of two, three, eighty and a hundred years.

The —— teacher

Barbara teaches geography part-time, sits on the board of the Distretto Biologico di Calenzano, and describes herself as a true teacher at heart, when it comes down to it. She received a university delegation from a dozen countries not long ago, and presented the farm as a working argument: olives and grain grown together in the same rows, the old way, set against the tidy monoculture of a luxury estate. 

What she wants from her guests is that they leave Podere Montisi having seen, as she puts it, that "another way is possible." She says our footprint is "too deep, too big," and that our resources were never endless. The farm, she thinks, makes the case better than she can. It "speaks by itself."