Africo: renewing the magic of a cultural laboratory

August 31, 2026

In the heart of Calabria’s Aspromonte, something remarkable happens every summer. People return to the mountain not simply to visit it, but to inhabit it: they walk its paths, gather beneath ancient trees, listen to stories, share food, make music, discuss literature and science, remember those who came before them and imagine what might come next.

This is the spirit of Gente in Aspromonte, the cultural gathering created by writer Gioacchino Criaco and now in its eighth edition. Held in Africo Antico, the 2026 programme brought together literature, anthropology, science, music, art, food, craftsmanship and local memory around the landscape of the Aspromonte. More than a thousand people took part in the gathering, which this year marked the 70th anniversary of the death of Corrado Alvaro, the great Calabrian writer whose work remains deeply connected to the people and landscapes of the region.

Calling it a festival, however, does not quite capture what makes Africo different. A festival usually brings culture into a place. Gente in Aspromonte does almost the opposite. It allows the culture already embedded in a place to emerge, to be shared and to be reinterpreted by the people who live there and those who return to discover it.

The setting is an essential part of the experience. Africo Antico, once a living mountain community and now largely abandoned, becomes a place of encounter again. Under the trees and among the remains of the old settlement, spaces that have been silent for decades are temporarily transformed into places for conversation, music, food and exchange. The landscape itself becomes part of the programme.

This offers an interesting perspective on territorial regeneration. Regeneration is often associated with buildings, infrastructure, investment and tourism. Yet a place can also be regenerated by restoring the reasons for people to come together. An abandoned building can become a meeting place, an old path can become a cultural route, a tree can become the starting point for scientific research and a forgotten recipe can open a conversation about biodiversity, nutrition and agricultural heritage.

The 2026 programme demonstrated this particularly well through its attention to the acorn. Once an important food in Mediterranean communities, the acorn is now largely absent from contemporary diets. Its biology, nutritional properties and potential uses became the subject of conversations between ethnobotany and food science. What might appear to be a simple fruit of the forest suddenly connected botany, chemistry, nutrition, agriculture, history and local culture.

The same principle appeared in the conversations around music and craftsmanship, where traditional knowledge met the work of a new generation of makers. These encounters demonstrate that cultural heritage is not something fixed in the past. It can remain alive when knowledge is allowed to move between generations and when traditional practices are given new contexts in which to develop.

This is particularly important in rural territories, where some of the knowledge needed for regeneration already exists within the community. Farmers understand the land and its seasons. Artisans understand local materials. Cooks remember ingredients and techniques that have disappeared from everyday life. Older generations carry memories of landscapes and customs that may no longer be visible. Younger people can reinterpret that knowledge and give it new meaning.

The challenge is often not to import knowledge, but to connect the knowledge that is already there.

That connection is what makes Africo so interesting. Researchers meet local knowledge, writers meet landscapes, artists meet traditions, producers meet visitors and younger generations meet those who remember the village before its abandonment. Culture becomes a means of creating relationships between people and between different forms of knowledge.

There is also an important distinction between this approach and conventional tourism. Tourism tends to ask how a place can attract visitors. A living-territory approach begins with a different question: what can make a place meaningful to the people who already belong to it, and how can that meaning be shared with others without losing its character?

Africo does not need to become a destination manufactured for visitors. Its value comes precisely from the fact that the landscape, its history and its communities remain at the centre. People are not simply being invited to consume an image of Calabria. They are being invited to listen to it, walk through it and participate in the conversations that give it meaning.

Memory is particularly powerful in Africo. The old village carries the history of a community that experienced displacement and abandonment. Returning to these places therefore means more than celebrating a picturesque landscape. It is also a way of acknowledging what was lost and of allowing that memory to remain part of the future.

Memory, in this sense, is not nostalgia. It is a resource.

The paths, trees, buildings, foods, songs and stories of a territory can all become forms of collective knowledge. When they are brought together, they create a richer understanding of what a place is and what it might become.

There is something deeply contemporary about this model. At a moment when communities across Europe are looking for new ways to respond to rural depopulation, ecological degradation and the loss of cultural knowledge, Africo offers a reminder that resilience does not always begin with a new technology or a new infrastructure project. Sometimes it begins with people gathering around a table, beneath a tree, on a mountain path or in a place that has almost disappeared from the map.

What makes Gente in Aspromonte powerful is the way these different elements reinforce one another. Literature becomes a way of reading the landscape. Science opens new perspectives on traditional foods. Food reconnects people with agriculture and biodiversity. Craftsmanship keeps knowledge in circulation. Memory connects generations. And the landscape provides the common ground on which all of these encounters can take place.

This is what makes Africo a cultural laboratory. Not because it separates culture from everyday life, but because it brings different forms of knowledge back together.

The future of rural territories may depend on precisely these connections: between people and land, memory and innovation, agriculture and culture, biodiversity and wellbeing. Regeneration does not always mean rebuilding what has disappeared. Sometimes it means recognising what remains, bringing it back into relationship and creating the conditions for it to live again.

Under the ancient trees of Aspromonte, Africo is showing how much can happen when a territory is allowed to tell its own story.

CPM