Il Bosco Nuovo Ol

Fagnano Olona

It seems like it has always been like that, it looks like everything has grown spontaneously; then you realize that it is not like that, a careful eye notes that only few plants are ripe, the plants are just over ten years old, or rather they have been planted exactly ten years ago. However, this time was enough to significantly change the surrounding environment.

Fredrik Sioberg in the book "the art of collecting flies" has an interesting insight, he underlines "the importance of love" in the modification of the environment and the eco-system. "It is a factor that is rarely taken into account in the development of the current ecosystem, strongly determined by cultural aspects .... In the past it was the necessity of misery that pushed human beings to conform the landscape ......., today they are wealth and pleasure ".

Everything changes constantly, once there was a mill here, now there is only a depression where the mill canal passed and some piece of wall, then came the '900 century and the weaving and dyeing, these lands had become only the back of the factory, the place where water treatment plants had been built before putting them back to the river.

In the last decades the land was no longer good to cultivate, too small, too difficult and especially near the foul-smelling river. Some fields were then cultivated in coplet pine woods, but it did not last long, all the trees had to be cut before the sale.

I think it was the desire to "reappropriate" this landscape, for many identity, which dictated the choice to plant trees, this outcast and economically irrelevant area has been fertile land to cultivate collective imagination in these ten years.

In 2008 the association Calimali participates in a call for funding of the Fondazione Comunitaria del Varesotto with the project to planting 500 trees.
Bosco Nuovo is now a reality.
The one made by the Calimals was a first, but significant step that was followed by numerous others by citizens and public administrations.

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