Giorgia Caruso always imagined her children one day inheriting the farm her family has tended for three generations.
Her daughters would do more than produce organic meat and dairy. They would continue a way of life central to Piana degli Albanesi, a community founded 500 years ago by Albanian refugees fleeing the Ottoman conquest. Perched on a fertile plateau in the mountains south of Palermo, the town has long provided much of the wheat and dairy central to Sicily’s agricultural traditions. Caruso hoped to see her children carry those traditions on.
“I have two daughters I wished could take over our farming business one day, which is like our third child,” Caruso said with teary eyes as she tended the last of the family’s livestock.
Now she’d like to see them build their lives somewhere safer.
