![]() “When people sell their houses, they sell him their floor tiles and the old ones that have been saved are still cheaper than the ones from the companies making replicas. “People pay so much to get that look, but it’s actually just what happens naturally over the years.”Įlsewhere, sink backsplashes are a collage of original 200-year-old hand-painted tiles from Japan, England, India and Piedmont, found by local interiors “guru and miracle worker” Paolo Virano. “There’s a big part of me that really wants to strip it right back,” Wolff says. Photograph: Monica Spezia/Living Insideīuilt in the 1600s, the cascina has played home to many different families and its walls show its age with up to four centuries of different renderings. The pay-off is full board, so while Iuli is out in the fields with the seasonal crew, Wolff is hosting no fewer than seven different nationalities around her dinner table at any one time for breakfast, lunch and dinner (as well as continuing to run her own international import business and the Village Forest School she founded with a friend last year whose classroom is a yurt on the land). “It’s a great way to get people into organic farming and learn about the old systems,” says Wolff who, when we chat, has a house full. We’re speaking over Zoom one evening in late September when the annual grape harvest is in full swing and to help them out, the couple work with the nonprofit World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms (Wwoof) to host people, affectionately known as Wwoofers, to work the land. ![]() With two young children – Ettore, five, and Gioacchino, seven – now running around, it is – needless to say – a round-the-clock operation. One of the most exciting organic wineries in Italy, it specialises in local barbera, nebbiolo and grignolino grapes as well as two recent additions to the Italian registry of grape varieties: the once-abandoned slarina and the white wine grape baratuciat. Since Wolff and her husband have lived there together, they have made it a labour of love to regenerate this corner of the world through their already established, but rapidly growing business, Cascina Iuli. It’s a common occurrence in lots of Italy’s rural towns: in Monferrato’s case, the opening of the Fiat factory in nearby Turin in the late 1960s and several debilitating seasons of hailstorms drove the farmers and their families to pastures new. That was in 2008 and by the following spring the pair were living together in the small village that had been home to Iuli’s family for five generations, but whose population had slowly shrunk to just 70 over the decades. Labour of love: the long outside dining table.
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