03/12/2025
The landslide that, on the morning of Monday, November 17, swept away the historic center of Brazzano caused two deaths and one injury. It also erased a substantial part of the village’s medieval core, inflicting on the community an identity wound that will be difficult to heal. The events mentioned above have rightly galvanized public attention and sentiment. However, technicians and operators must not forget that there is another victim of the disaster: the Ronco della Chiesa, the vineyard struck by the landslide that, coming from the forested land above it, overwhelmed it. The vineyard is gravely wounded but still alive.
The Ronco della Chiesa vineyard, part of the Borgo del Tiglio estate, is one of the few remaining agronomic masterpieces dating back to the 1950s, when the agricultural layout was still executed by hand and with the use of animals such as horses and oxen, just as it had been in previous centuries. Beyond its historical and, in a sense, agronomic-archaeological value, the Ronco della Chiesa preserves the ancient wisdom of human intervention on steep hillside slopes to plant a vineyard without altering or eroding the fertility and profile of the soil that, over millennia, was formed by the evolution of the parent rock known as Flysch.
Flysch, which in the Collio dialect is called Ponca, is a sedimentary rock composed of alternating layers of sandstone (made of coarser elements such as sands) and marl (made of finer elements such as clay). The differing consistency of these two layers gives the rock a high friability and, at the same time, ease of sliding between its layers. The name Flysch itself comes from Swiss German dialect and means “slippery ground.” The instability of this rock is particularly amplified when water infiltrates between the layers, facilitating slippage; therefore, the management of both surface and groundwater is crucial to prevent erosion and landslides. Before the advent of mechanization, people had developed a sophisticated understanding of how to transform these slopes into fertile vineyards. The Ronco della Chiesa remains today perhaps the only living example of this culture, thanks to the determination and care of its owner, Nicola Manferrari, who has preserved its authenticity over time. These agricultural works involved creating small terraces capable of hosting only a single row of vines. With only animal traction available, work advanced with a plow following the contour lines. The opened furrow was worked by hand with a spade, moving a small amount of soil downhill, enough to form a slight edge. This is how the vineyard’s architecture was born, preserving intact the original surface soil profile which, through millennia of evolution, had attained its fertility, while keeping the deeper stratigraphy unaltered. These are vineyards that show no signs of drought stress or nutrient deficiencies. A curious and distinctive feature of the Ronco della Chiesa vineyard lies in the fact that even small surface water infiltrations, when intercepted, were channeled using the very stones emerging from the soil; being laminar, they allowed the creation of small inverted-U underground collectors capable of draining water and preventing surface runoff.
Today, in light of recent events involving hydrogeological instability and increasingly extreme weather patterns, the Ronco della Chiesa vineyard represents a cultural heritage site, an open-air museum of good agronomic practices which, in their fundamentals, could serve as a valid criterion for future interventions in sustainable viticultural development in hillside areas.
The above considerations suggest that the stabilization and safety work on the landslide and the slip point should proceed with the caution and sensitivity required to safeguard a precious cultural asset, in the same way as one would approach other great achievements of human ingenuity.
Gianfranco Gallo
