Regional development
Thinking globally and acting locally is a simple and brilliant slogan.
When we started our community in 1982 we soon got an invitation by the city government of the nearby town of Orvieto. The communist mayor and his cabinet wanted to know what was our concept of revitalizing the largely abandoned hills of the “Orvietano” from where the younger generation had fled to the valleys or moved directly to Rome or Milano. Not only didn’t we have an answer but we didn’t even understand the question. We had moved to Piaggia because there were big, empty buildings and a large piece of land. Who had moved out of these buildings and why they had left that land has not been our concern.
But we did our homework. The school in Montegiove, the neighbouring hamlet, was about to close and our group sending six children there, guaranteed its survival several years. Together with the university of Perugia we started a project on intercultural education which taught us a lot about where we hand landed. Beatrix, one of our members became a city councillor in Montegabbione, we organized for nine years an annual conference on regional sustainable development, the “Colloqui di Montegabbione”. Today local sustainable development has become a household term and we like to think that we did much to make that so in this area.