The “Parco Comune dei Frutti Minori” or “Communal Park for Forgotten Fruit” in Castiglione d'Otranto was founded by the Casa delle Agriculture association in 2013 as an exploration of the group’s vision, designed to promote physical itineraries within a larger social and institutional network. The park is a series of walking paths and rural roads that extend out from the town’s residential area for a total length of 12.7 km. These have all been freed from the insidious impacts of illegal garbage dumping and the use of toxic chemical pesticides that were once common practice. This was possible thanks to constant, pro-active interventions aimed at protecting, rehabilitating, and cultivating the land together while placing value in agro-biodiversity.

This “park” is both a natural and a rural area that, despite a lack of formal recognition, is recognizable thanks to the daily intervention of local citizens. Today it is a “Communal Park,” i.e. a common good with intrinsic botanical, historical and economic characteristics, where widespread sense of ownership is a reality in both the public and private spheres. The “frutti minori” or “forgotten fruits” are the varieties given little consideration in the conventional marketplace. These include cultivars of fig, pear, jujube, quince, medlar and many more traditional plants and crops often at risk of extinction. For centuries they formed the foundation of the local subsistence farming economy. This term “minor” in Italian, or “forgotten” in English, also describes the way the dominant culture has relegated local people, territories and practices to the margins, in particular: people with disabilities, migrants, the elderly, small family farmers and traditional systems of natural farming. For us, these fundamental elements are key ingredients for the kind of social innovation underway today in Castiglione d'Otranto, where “those who sow utopia, harvest reality.”