The farm

THE AGRICULTURAL SOUL OF MASO ZAMBO

With 2 and a half hectares of land (partly with woods, the remaining part for pasture), Maso Zambo is, before being an agritourism, a real farm. Even before Zambo bought it, it was the countryside home in Valsassina of a dear family friend, who kept some animals here and tended the vegetable garden.

This is how Maso Zambo was born: from a rural soul of which we preserve the surrounding nature, and a high pedigree.

In the spring of 2014 came the first vegetable production under the new management: an invasion of zucchine trombetta (a type of squash) and blueberries was our debut that year. Over time, the vegetable garden grew significantly thanks to the building of a greenhouse and of terraces with reinforced soil.

Since 2015 we’ve diversified and increased the number of animals: after Martina, the doyen donkey (born in 1996), Simona was born in 2016.

With the arrival of the egg-laying hens, of ducks, geese, bees, our endowment quickly took shape. This is Maso Zambo’s ark.

WALKING THE LAND

Earth is the primary element from which everything was born. Indeed, Zambo was charmed by its power. And that’s when the compelling words of Luigi Veronelli came to his mind, his “walking the land”.

During his childhood holidays, Zambo ate a lot of earth in Valsassina: in the shape of the dust in the football field at the oratory in Barzio, a few kilometres away, and of the earth in the garden, around the house where generations of his family would spend their holidays, also in Barzio.

And now, after a break in Milan, comes the rediscovery of the earth in Maso Zambo. In the stepping over it, up and down, while completing the endless tasks of a farmer. In the smell the soil oozes when a wild animal passes by. In the aroma of mushrooms and underwood. In the primordial power that transforms a seed into a plant bearing fruits. In sensing the seasons through the colours of the lawn, or in the explosion of green chlorophyll after manuring. In the earth’s muffled silence, when it’s covered with snow.

This is all that makes “walking the land”: an onomatopoeic definition of the relationship between man and environment, a practice oozing life and the primordial power of nature. At the Maso, you’ll walk the land of Valsassina following the same steps.