The Project
A cultural project that interweaves research, storytelling, and communication in Friuli Venezia Giulia.
Ancestrale Project was born from encounters with these people—farmers who have chosen a different way of being in the territory. Not a romantic return to the past, but a precise vision of the future: producing while respecting the rhythms of animals, the cycles of the seasons, and the balance of a landscape that holds memory.
What they preserve is not just food. It is an intangible heritage—made of transmitted knowledge, daily gestures, and relationships between humans, animals, and land—that the 2003 UNESCO Convention recognizes as a living part of a place’s culture. A heritage at risk of disappearing silently, not for lack of value, but for lack of attention.
The project developed through participatory mapping of regional realities practicing ethical farming in extensive and sustainable ways. The research focused particularly on experiences that, while rooted in tradition, are today reinterpreting the shepherd’s craft in contemporary terms, with innovative, responsible, and conscious approaches. These are farmers who, often at the margins of the dominant production system, operate with an alternative vision, building local economies, relationships with the territory, and new forms of storytelling.
Ancestrale Project is therefore configured as a cultural project that interweaves research, storytelling, and communication: meeting these shepherds sui generis, collecting their stories, observing daily practices, documenting the landscapes in which they live and work. An initiative that aims to give visibility to those who, today, choose to live and produce in harmony with nature, bringing back to the center the profound connection between humans, animals, and territory.
But this project does not only tell the story of farms. It also tells the story of chefs—like Chiara Canzoneri in Gorizia—who allow themselves to be transformed by that work, who build direct relationships with producers, who bring to the plate not just raw ingredients but an ethic and a territory. And it tells the story of those who, like Antonio Bonelli in Cormons, bridge worlds that still struggle to communicate—selecting, explaining, keeping alive a supply chain that knows where it comes from and where it wants to go.
