Where courage begins

This article is published in number 4 of Vanity Fair on newsstands until January 27, 2021

The signal tape that bars the front door of what used to be the house of Agitu Gudeta you can see it from afar and it hurts your eyes. It happens for that intermittent and totally incongruent red with the infinite shades of white that snow knows how to assume when it covers everything. It happens because of the absurdity it testifies: Agitu was killed.
In the end she found it here, in this small remote valley of Trentino, that death from which she had fled to Ethiopia, where she denounced the expropriation of land by the government and, for this reason, she was hunted down by the military.

One thinks of Samarcanda di Vecchioni while Sandro’s camper, his friend for many years, drives straight ahead to stop a few kilometers further on, in Fierozzo, where Agi – as everyone called it – is still there.

A good shepherd knows that when there is silence in his stable, his animals are fine. And in the stable of the Agi goats (about eighty, almost all pregnant) there is an almost solemn silence, broken only by the delicate sound of hooves trampling the straw, horns that are entrenched in the eagerness to reach the hay in the manger, teeth that chew. They are Mochene, chamois, Valais goats, related and selected to make delicious milk, an immense family of females in which the only two males stand out for their shyness and modest size: they must be fed favoritism, because the others never let them eat. To take care of them is Beatrice Zott, a young 19-year-old shepherdess. The newspapers have described this passing of the baton with emphasis, but, she shields herself, “I only do my job: the breeders’ federation, through the mayor, asked me if I could take care of the stable until Agitu’s family decides that what to do with animals. And I, who have only 10 of my goats, accepted ».

Beatrice comes from a family of shepherds: her grandparents were and so was the father who, however, when she was born, sold the flock, perhaps imagining a more normal life. The same one who looked for Beatrice, at least until something cracked inside her. “I was enrolled in art school, but I started having panic attacks. I could no longer catch a bus, a train: nothing I could not get off from if and when I decided. I had to withdraw from school, and depression began, a terrible year that ended on a specific day: the one in which I took the first of a series of trains that would take me to Switzerland. ” There Beatrice works on a farm and learns the things that she already knows without knowing it, because she has always seen her grandparents do them. «After that experience I had another one in Valle d’Aosta. Then, last summer, I took over 250 goats and rented my grandparents’ old hut, which in the meantime had been sold: I went there for 5 months, alone, without hot water or running. My boyfriend only came on weekends, the rest of the time it was me and the dog: I wasn’t afraid with him. This is hard work, you have to love nature, solitude, silence. In the morning you wake up crying because you know how much effort awaits you and in the evening you go to sleep smiling, because you are happy“. As she talks, Beatrice lifts bales of hay weighing 15 kilos, throws them, dismember them, steals small tufts to give to the goats that approach her, their faces stretched out like little dogs. «Agi was a modern shepherdess: she did everything without the dog, the animals listened to her and followed her. The flock now knows that she is gone: I have another voice and another face. But they took me well, perhaps because they realized that I am wilder than them ».

The Valle dei Mocheni is a piece of Trentino mountains torn from the logic of mass tourism: no ski lifts, no cross-country trails. Under the ground it hides water sources and metalliferous veins, now exhausted, dug in the past by German migrants who were fleeing from hunger, above it is dotted with churches, farms and huts. The unit of measurement of the local economy has always been the farm, a house that is also a stable, farm, vegetable garden, orchard. The autarchic utopia dictated not by idealism but by necessity. The farm produces something for the needs of the family that lives there, and there is something left over which serves as a bargaining chip. After decades of progressive depopulation, the children and grandchildren of those who had left are returning to this and other valleys, and it is mainly women who try to make this life choice a job. “Courage and an attitude to care are the characteristics that are needed to take this step. It seems to me quite inevitable that women have become the engine of these places », says Margherita Menestrina, 33 years old and three children, trained as an educator in Trento, a shepherdess of 40 goats and a small cheese producer in Margone, in the Valle dei Laghi. «Agitu has been a source of moral inspiration and an entrepreneurial example for me and for many other women. Many times, faced with important choices, I found myself wondering what she would have done. Sometimes I called her and asked her directly, but then there was no more need: I already knew that she would have made the fairest and most courageous choice ». Everyone knew Agitu by reputation and also in person because she ran markets where she sold her French-aged cheeses and because she attended many refresher courses. “She wanted to learn everything and then took a step further: she had become a point of reference – not only for us women – and her company was the subject of research and study.. It was revolutionary from many points of view: for its way of handling animals, for how milk was processed, for its idea that pastures belong to those who graze them. But in my opinion the most important thing he did was to live with integrity: he brought his values ​​of freedom, equality, integration, gender equality into agriculture – an area not really open by tradition. His idea of ​​a free world where people behave fairly with each other. She was much more than a courageous shepherdess, she was a special person“. On her WhatsApp profile, Margherita posted a photo of Agi. The photo is resting on the snow, behind it you can guess the intertwining of a commemorative crown. On the photo it says: you will always be here.

Laura Masciocchi was also Agitu’s friend and colleague. Born in Varese, she graduated in agriculture and, after a summer in the malga, she realized that, instead of working at the local health authority, she wanted to become a shepherd. She attended a course at the Moretta Dairy Institute (Cuneo) and there she met Enrico, her husband. For 10 years in the winter they have lived “on the outskirts of Pez, a town with 24 inhabitants”, in the Adamello-Brenta Park. It is the two of them, Leandro and Remigio (4 years and 16 months), a hundred animals including goats, sheep, cows and a small dairy. In the summer they go up with the animals to the Malga Stabio. “That’s where my waters broke when Leandro was born“, remember. Laura’s stable is organized like a Swiss boarding school – nothing to do with the quiet and crowded anarchy of Agitu’s stable, “but everyone has their own style of rearing,” says the shepherd – with a milking area and a nursery that at the moment it hosts two little lambs that its children are bottle-feeding. In addition to cheeses, they would like to open a small summer store of homemade ice cream, “three or four flavors at most, we’ll see if we can”. Meanwhile, the first thought is the many upcoming births (goats and sheep are synchronized with the births); before, if there was any problem, it was enough to call Agi who “always knew how to get a goat that couldn’t get out.” Now you have to trust your memories and your hands, and do it yourself.

Just above the Agitu stable begins a steep climb that leads to the Klopfhof farm, a small farmhouse that is the realization of the Barbara’s dream: to recover the stable of her great-grandparents where she spent the summers, and to go and live there. “My mother was against it, and even Daniele, who would become my husband and worked in a factory in Trento, said I was completely crazy”. But now, after his resignation, he too lives happily here, with their 4 children, aged 15 to 3. They feed, and feed their hosts, of what they produce. They raise and slaughter “with respect: if the animal knows you, it is not afraid”, they heat everything with wood, collect and use rainwater. Barbara, who ate nothing until she was twenty, started cooking and discovered she had passion and talent. With other women in the area he also started a project of recovery and reuse of sheep’s wool, which for shepherds is a waste to be disposed of for a fee, because it contains nitrogen. “We clean, card and work it so as to make balls naturally dyed (with fruit and vegetables) or fillings for pillows and duvets”. Among the members of the project, which is called Bollait (in the Mochena language it means “people of wool”), there are Daniela who has a bread and mountain sweets laboratory, Giovanna who manages a farmhouse in Val Sugana and Vea Carpi who has a small restaurant on a farm. Born in Pisa, after graduating in political science Vea moved to Trentino for love and started, from scratch, to try to do everything: cultivate, raise, cook. At her Mas del Saro, where she lives with her husband Renzo and three children, she offers vegetarian dishes with what her garden offers. “Not knowing how to do anything was a great risk, but also an opportunity to be free without rules and traditions to respect”. In his restaurant there were Agitu cheeses. “I had to explain her death to my daughters, who knew her. I said that she lived proving that a woman alone can do business, but that I also believe she died for this: if she had been a man I think she would not have been killed. Because the male entrepreneur is recognized as having a role towards which employees have respect and even sometimes fear. We women have to struggle to make ourselves recognized. His, mine, is a sector in which we are not foreseen, if not accompanied by a male. In certain situations I myself have to ask my husband to intervene, to speak for me. His end was the demonstration of how he lived, taken to the extreme. An example we must treasure».

PHOTO: ANDREA FRAZZETTA

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