"If you decide to play, play it well." Coherent to this motto, the author begins telling us her first, unexpected, approach with the art of the cultivation. Facing a ground that risked to become overgrown and abandoned, she couldn’t stand it and commits to keep it alive. Thanks to her skilled hands, the ground lived a new happy season. It begins from this unexpected event the experience of the writer with gardening and with the dimension of farming, so tied up to the earth but at the same time - she discovers - extremely close to the spirit. Educating the earth, the Man educated itself, or as a Greek philosopher wrote "the man is himself the field to be cultivated, the good seed and the experienced farmer."

The trip in which the author drives us is so fascinating, going through the details of seeding, the different steps of growth from the seed to the vegetable, in the always fundamental care (quoting Simone Weil "Never, in any case, a true effort of attention must be wasted): Care as exercise and daily appointment. Taking care of a garden is a way to love and to take care of Life. Care exemplified in to giving water, supporting, shearing and so on…because what matters is not to succeed but the entire process of caring of as base that the human existence makes possible properly as “human”. Through the description of these small but concrete and continuous gestures of love, through the history of parsley and the zucchini, it may seem paradoxical but in reality we fully understand the sense of Life and its complete dimension which, as Panikarr says, “is neither pure contemplation neither action alone; rather it is the contemplative action and the active contemplation, a non-separated life. Its name is wisdom.”


Adriana Bonavia Giorgetti
L’arte di coltivare l’orto e se stessi (The art of cultivating the garden and oneself)
Ponte alle grazie