The hill of Lorenzo

Go back into nature to know and love it. In Castiglione delle Stiviere, in the province of Mantua, there is the "Collina di Lorenzo".
A 13-hectare land that welcomes 20,000 elementary school children every year: they come just to live once immersed in dozens of plant and animal species.
To animate and take care of the place is Fausto De Stefani, the second Italian mountaineer to have climbed all the mountains above eight thousand meters.

"At a certain point I realized that making sense of my existence meant leaving something for when I am gone," says De Stefani. After many years of environmental activism, "I felt the need to do something different, starting with my little one".
Thus, on the land inherited from Lorenzo Saviola, a dear friend, a world has grown that inevitably brings you back to childhood.
At the Collina, a network of paths leads to hand-built wooden houses in the woods or on trees, to a tent from Mongolia, to the little lake of the gnomes and to the "sources of the sky".

Everything is designed for children, because «what one receives in childhood, then remains until the last breath» explains De Stefani.
Children listen to him, they are amazed, they are enthusiastic. De Stefani does not speak to them of his exploits in the mountains. Instead, he tells of the “Cascina Rossa”: the place where he was childhood where, sixty years ago, several families lived together, with many children who also lived together in common.
In the evening an old man called Mandelo arrived and was welcomed at the farmhouse. He was poor, but he had a voice that knew how to tell many stories and lead the little ones to travel with their imagination to distant and beautiful places.
“I've never seen that old man get angry. Yet he did not own anything »recalls De Stefani.

Today the voice that makes so many children travel is his. With environmental education workshops, it brings them into the beauty of nature, so that everyone can feel it their own and take care of it.

Chiara Vitali
NP November 2021