Quintosapore is a farm at Città della Pieve, in the Umbrian hills above Lake Trasimeno, run by identical twin brothers Alessandro and Nicola Giuggioli with their sister Livia. Neither brother came from farming. Nicola had been president of the sustainability consultancy Eco-Age, Alessandro worked in film production. In 2016 they bought 25 hectares of abandoned, uncultivated land next to their parents' farmhouse and started again from the soil.
What they built there is unusual even by the standards of Italian smallholdings. The farm now keeps 55 varieties of tomato, 25 of pepper, 15 of courgette, 10 of aubergine, 25 of strawberry and around 100 ancient fruit trees, alongside roughly 100 varieties of chili. Almost all of it is grown from seed the brothers save themselves, including forgotten local varieties they have tracked down and brought back into cultivation, and new ones that appear when the pollinators do the crossing for them.
They call the method agriconcura, farming with care: care for the soil, for the people who work the land, and for whoever eats the result. In practice it means learning from how a wild system behaves rather than overriding it, with regenerative and biodynamic practices, agroforestry, biochar and effective microorganisms, and very little machinery. Sowing, harvesting, peeling and chopping are done by hand, at the speed that requires. As Alessandro puts it, “It's the time of nature, which is slow.”
The second half of the farm is the Farm Kitchen Lab, where Nicola cooks what Alessandro harvests, often the same day. Vegetables are smoked outdoors over a wood fire before they are jarred, plums are concentrated under vacuum at low temperature so almost no sugar is needed, onions for the genovese are sliced by hand and cooked for close to two days. Nothing is bought in to fill a recipe out: the olive oil in every jar is pressed from the farm's own olives, the chili and the garlic come from the same fields as the vegetables. They describe it as seed to jar, and they mean it literally.
Their signature crop is aglione, the giant heirloom garlic of the Valdichiana just over the hill. Botanically it is closer to the leek than to common garlic, Allium ampeloprasum, with bulbs that can weigh most of a kilo and single cloves the size of a plum. It was grown here in Etruscan times, nearly disappeared in the twentieth century because it is slow and awkward to farm, and is now protected by a handful of growers in the valley. Its flavour is round and sweet where common garlic is sharp, and it leaves almost none of the lingering bite behind, which is why the valley calls it the kiss garlic. Quintosapore grow it, then turn it into sauce, tartare, aioli, salt and a spread made from the flowering stalks.
For Terra Sacra, Quintosapore is the clearest example of a producer whose farming and whose cooking are the same act, done by the same two pairs of hands.
