oss 150 kroner!
Tolfa, Italy · October 5–9
What can the history of a place teach us about its future?
Hosts: Bjarne Berg Wig and Pål Steigan.
Five hundred years ago, the small mountain town of Tolfa became one of the most strategically important places in Europe.
The reason was hidden in the mountains.
Alum.
After rich deposits were discovered near Tolfa in the fifteenth century, the mines became an extraordinary source of revenue for the Papal States. The wealth generated here helped finance Renaissance Florence and Rome — as well as Michelangelo, Raphael, Botticelli and Leonardo — and contributed to the enormous building projects of the period, including St Peter’s Basilica.
For a time, this little place in the mountains was connected to trade, politics, art and power across Europe.
Then the world changed.
Today Tolfa is a town of around 5,000 people.
But the alum mines are still here. So are the mountains, the ancient commons, the horsemen, the artisans, the agricultural traditions, the festivals, the architecture, the food — and, above all, the stories.
What if these are not merely remains of the past?
What if they are resources for building the future?
That question is at the heart of The Tolfa Initiative.
A tree falls with a roar. A seed grows in silence.
The old centralized world is showing its cracks. What replaces it will not necessarily arrive from Brussels, Rome, Washington or the global marketplace.
Much of it may have to be grown again — locally.
But nobody builds a future from nothing.
Every place already contains resources: history, knowledge, relationships, traditions, institutions, skills, landscapes and stories. The first task is learning to see them.
Three keys
The Tolfa workshop explores three keys to building proud, resilient and viable local communities:
LOCAL HISTORY — ROOTS
Learn to read the history of a place not as nostalgia, but as a resource.
What created wealth here? What knowledge accumulated? What institutions survived? What did previous generations learn? Why did some initiatives succeed while others disappeared?
Tolfa itself becomes our first case study.
SYSTEMS THINKING — CONNECTIONS
A community is not a collection of separate problems.
People, businesses, institutions, land, money, knowledge, energy and culture form a living system.
We learn to map those relationships, distinguish causes from symptoms and find the leverage points where relatively small actions can create large consequences.
LOCAL INNOVATION — ACTION
History tells us what we have inherited. Systems thinking helps us understand what we have. Innovation asks:
What can we do with it now?
Participants turn insight into concrete experiments — initiatives rooted in the resources and character of their own communities rather than solutions copied from somewhere else.
DIG · MAP · FORGE · CARRY FORWARD
DIG
Read the place. Explore its history, people, traditions, resources and forgotten possibilities.
MAP
Understand the living system. Find connections, flows, obstacles and leverage points.
FORGE
Turn what you discover into something new and useful.
CARRY FORWARD
Return home with a method, an initiative and a network.
The mycelium
A forest offers another image.
Beneath the surface, mycelium connects roots, carries nutrients and helps new life emerge when old trees fall.
That is our vision.
Not one centralized organization exporting solutions to everyone else.
But people deeply rooted in their own places and connected internationally through knowledge, experience and solidarity.
Tolfa is not a model to copy.
It is a place in which to learn how to read a place.
Participants will leave not as experts on Tolfa, but better equipped to become experts on their own communities.
They will ask:
What is our alum?
What resource, history, skill, institution or forgotten possibility already exists beneath our feet?
And what could we build from it now?
The Tolfa workshop is not the project.
It is the seed.
October 5–9 · Tolfa, Italy
Come to Tolfa. Bring your place with you.
Price: 850 euros.
Contact: symposium@steigan.it
