To reach Aldo’s farm is like entering a Hobbit’s house, the dwelling of a druid in the middle of the woods. Inside there are shelves full of herbal oils and tinctures made at home, a laboratory to extract the essence contained in plants.
We leave behind the Magna Via to explore the back country of Agrigento, a territory that until not many years ago was completely ignored by tourists, the deep Sicily that very few outsiders know.
This time we land on a special place that has very little to do with standard tourism.
We’re at a farmer who observes the world in an extraordinary way.
The land is not just his livelihood, it’s a medium to understand a deeper wisdom.
Some people call him shaman, but he does not like to be called as such. He’s just a farmer, son of farmers. An alchemist at most.
“It is said that the alchemists looked for gold,” Aldo says, in front of the laboratory counter with cast-iron pans, mortars and pestles filled with mashed herbs. “It isn’t true. They were looking for themselves.”
He argues that an ancient wisdom reside with these fibres and roots present on earth since hundreds of millions of years.
Throughout his 70 years he collected a vast amount of plants, some of them very rare. Herbs, succulents, huge agaves, centuries-old olive and pistachio trees, and his personal favourite, the queen of all plants: mandrake.
Suddenly, an old but revolutionary lifestyle appears before our eyes: trying to know everything that the plants know and living with that wisdom.