Market Square

This piazza in Strada is the secondary square in our mountain village. I hadn’t realised this was where the livestock market was held in the 1940s. Now you’d find it a job to see cows or sheep. The depopulation of these hills with their fragmented landholding where a feudalistic share cropping predominated until the land reforms and abandonment of the 1950s and 1960s needs to be read alongside the return of wolves and the attraction of regular wages in Florence and Bologna. The scrub woodland grew back and the old terraces disappeared under a cloak of rampant bramble, field maple and downy oak.