In rural Italy, students learn how farming and food connect us all

“The Rome Center has always placed travel as one of the most important pillars of the education students get when they come to Rome,” says Elizabeth Simari, a Rome Center adjunct professor of Italian culture and food. Along with adjunct photography professor Tom Denlinger, Simari leads what’s called a fusion program in the Abruzzo region of Italy where students learn about a rural, agricultural lifestyle. The time in Abruzzo can shift a student’s understanding of some foundational ideas about farming, food, and how nature and culture unite.

“At the beginning, we’re learning a lot about the reality at the farm,” says Simari. “But as we move throughout the program, we start to examine this larger food system, the larger circular economy of the area.” Students visit an olive oil press and a winery. They follow shepherds and their sheep up a mountain, and later make cheese from the sheep’s milk. They complete assignments that ask them to put all these pieces together, and they see how each decision regarding what and how they eat affects the natural world and the lives of others.

Back inside the pasta-making class, Viola Marcelli, the agriturismo’s instructor and food designer, showed the students how to make flour. She took a bag of farro that they’d grown themselves and poured it into a mill.

When Julian Lomeli (BS ’25) saw the flour pour into the bowl, his jaw dropped.

“Until you see where food is made,” Simari says, “or you have some sort of first-hand knowledge, you really have no information about the life cycle of that carton of milk, or that piece of cheese, or the life that the chicken had before it was just the breast lying on a Styrofoam dish.” In Abruzzo, students witness this cycle firsthand. “They start to really think about where their food comes from,” she says.

The students mixed flour with water or egg and then wrapped the dough to let it rest. Later, Marcelli, along with the restaurant’s chef, showed the class how to make different pasta shapes, including a ravioli stuffed with the farm’s own cheese. The pressure was on because whatever they made would become their dinner.

Later that night, the chef served the pasta they had made in a classic Abruzzi preparation.

“It’s really cool to see it truly go from farm to table,” says Lucia Eldridge (BA ’26). Eldridge had made homemade pasta with her father before but didn’t know how many different ways it could be done—and she imagines that she’ll be able to take this knowledge home.

“I sent my family photos of the pasta-making,” she says. Her dad was very excited. “He was like ‘Can you take a photo of the flour they’re using?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, this is the flour we’re using. And we also made flour,’” she says.

Eldridge is double-majoring in political science and women and gender studies. In Italy, she has seen her coursework come to life. “At one of the markets, our professor was like, ‘What do you notice about the
sellers?’” she says. “And we were noticing it’s a pretty diverse mix of genders, which was something different than in the U.S., and the shoppers—it’s a pretty diverse mix.” Eldridge has seen how factors like these ripple out into the larger cultural landscape. “It’s interesting to see that the way we eat food literally shapes how the city operates and how people govern it,” she says.

Lomeli, the student who was struck by the flour milling, says his time in Abruzzo gave him a new perspective on his life back home. Lomeli grew up in Chicago, but his grandparents live on a ranch in Mexico, and he has noticed a lot of similarities between this farm and the farm he grew up visiting near Guadalajara.

“I think I’ll appreciate it a lot more. When I was used to just that, I thought, ‘Oh, it’s just another farm,’” he says of his family’s ranch. But then he sees the effort that his class took to come to this farm in Italy. “It’s giving me a new lens to look at it through and appreciate it.”

A few days later, the class strapped on their hiking boots to go even further back into the food production timeline. Two shepherds had gathered some of the farm’s sheep for their routine hike up the mountain in search of fresh grazing.

With a sunhat on his head and a camera in his hands, Jahn-Vavrus followed the flock. Halfway up, he carefully made his way into the herd, which was chewing on the hardy mountain grasses. Soon, he found himself in the very center of the flock, the animals parting and flowing around him like water. He seemed fully present in the moment, snapping a few pictures and taking it all in.

“They trust you,” says one of the shepherds when Jahn-Vavrus came back to the trail.

The class descended, and when the sun began to sink behind the mountains, they gathered in the barn. It was time to milk the goats, and a few intrepid students approached the animals’ rear ends, which were lined up with milking suction tubes at work. A farm worker removed the tubes on one goat and beckoned for someone to give it a go with their own hands. Jahn-Vavrus, Lomeli, and Eldridge all gave it a try—as did several others.

One can read about milking an animal in a book but until one accidentally sprays oneself with warm milk straight from a goat’s udder, as one student did, it doesn’t fully come alive. “In Abruzzo, you’re learning hands on every day,” Simari says. “You’re experiencing the entire lifestyle.”

Experiences like these are also available to students back at the Rome campus. There, classes come together to study in the Rome Center’s own olive grove, citrus grove, and beehives. They learn about how these farming practices make up major cultural building blocks in Italy.

Elisa Ascione, associate dean of academic affairs and professor at the Rome Center facilitates some of these programs. “We involve the environmental studies class, the food class, and the Italian classes,” she says. “Even the theology class would come and talk about olives in symbolic terms.” For each farming practice (olives, citrus, and beekeeping), the center hosts a day of learning and harvest. “It’s a moment of communal work, but also sharing and being together,” she says. And, at the end, students get to sample the olive oil, marmalade, and honey—the fruits of their labor.

They say the way to someone’s heart is through their stomach and the same could be true about learning. Food helps the memories stick. In Abruzzo, this is part of the goal that inspired farmers Manuela Cozzi and Nunzio Marcelli to create La Porta dei Parchi.

“We want to share the philosophy of our life,” says Cozzi. “Sustainability is a theme in the culture of the people today, but 40 years ago it was a very strange subject. We think that to fight climate change, it’s very important that each person choose something sustainable in their life. We impact the environment with every choice in life. As you buy food, as you drive a car, as you choose your dress. We think that it is very important to share the philosophy to respect the environment.”

Every year Cozzi says they see visitors come for a bit of relaxation and end up leaving deeply changed.

A few days into the class trip, the evening sky was growing a dusky shade of rose, and the students were on hour two of a multicourse dinner made from ingredients growing just a stone’s throw away. They talked and laughed about their pasta handiwork, what they enjoyed about where they were—and what they missed back home.

This time on a farm in the mountains of Italy would likely impact each student in a different way, and these impacts might be unfurling for months and years to come. Maybe some students will choose to eat more locally. Others might think more about the animal that ended up as meat on their plate. Maybe others’ career paths will shift in subtle or major ways.

But that night around the table, the students were just letting it all sink in. Like pasta dough, lessons about how we impact the natural world and how nature lives on through us need time to rest before they’re ready to share.