Live, Learn, and Reimagine Alternatives in a Depopulating Hilltop Town
in Southern Italy
Most
study abroad programs promise exposure. aibia Italy’s summer program is
built around something deeper: personal transformation through lived
practice. aibia’s 2026 Summer School is a 12-week immersive experiential
learning program based in and around Roccavivara, a small hilltop
town in Molise in southern Italy. This project has been developed in
collaboration with the University of Montana and the University of
Münster, and it is designed for students who want more than a “study
abroad” experience. Our programs are designed for students who want to be provoked,
challenged, and placed inside a living question about what it would
take to build a different world—socially, economically, and
ecologically—starting from a place that is often treated as “marginal.”
The
fastest way to understand this program is to understand aibia’s larger
project. We are not running a field school as a one-off educational product. We
are building an intentional educational community and a living
laboratory—a place where learning is not confined to seminars and readings (though we do that too) or about
understanding systems, but about experiencing and experimenting with daily
practices and relationships that can become the seeds of alternative futures.
That means we treat “education” as something lived: how people provision, how
they cooperate, how they care for land and water, how they handle conflict, how
they create meaning, how they sustain community under pressure, and the
intimacy of their value systems. This program is an invitation to step into
that process as a participant—someone who learns, but also someone who helps
shape the questions, the conversations, and the collective outputs.
Roccavivara
and the surrounding valley are not a romantic backdrop. They are a real place
living through real forces: rural depopulation, economic precarity,
and climate stress. The town is also full of intelligence that doesn’t
always count as “expert knowledge” in formal institutions, yet which could hold
tools to unlock alternative futures: family food systems, practical land
awareness, intergenerational skills, informal mutual aid, and daily techniques
of making life work even as the wider world pulls people away. In aibia’s
approach, these are not quaint traditions to observe. They are resources
for thinking otherwise—starting points for asking: what kinds of
economies and ecologies are possible when people are forced to be inventive,
cooperative, and grounded? As they build everyday lives through a mix of
traditions, alternative practices, and modern necessity.
The
program’s learning arc is built around immersion and contrast. You don’t just
hear about “local production”—you see multiple versions of it side by side
across the broader Molise/Abruzzo region. Participants encounter family-level,
homestead, and artisanal production; next to larger family-owned
businesse; precisely so you can think concretely about scale, labor, value,
survival, and compromise. You learn from small farms and family plots; understand
local foraging practices; see how olive oil, wine, preserves, and cheeses are
made by hand and circulate through family and community life; and you pay
attention to the social container that makes those practices possible: piazzas,
markets, kinship networks, everyday reciprocity, and the quiet social
infrastructures that keep a traditional community alive, and is building
new parallel, back to the land, and permaculture movements.
At the same time, this is not a program that
treats “nature” as scenery. A new and defining part of the aibia Summer
School is its commitment to the more-than-human valley: land, soils,
slopes, water flows, vegetation, insects, animals, and microclimates—not as
separate “environmental topics,” but as realities that shape (and are shaped
by) the symbiotic relationship between humans and their environment; from livelihoods,
to settlement patterns, and agricultural and cultural practices. The program
includes a dedicated environmental science field week, designed
to be accessible for both scientist and practitioner where students learn to
understand landscapes: how water moves, where erosion shows up, what soils
reveal, what vegetation and insect life signal, and how climate stress can become
visible in everyday lives. This week is designed to help students connect what
they see culturally to what they can observe ecologically, to introduce a way of seeing social
and ecological lives as inseparable, and where “climate change” becomes
a clear set of relations one can learn to notice, interpret, and engage
with.
aibia calls this overall approach critical reimaginative theory: a
disciplined process that begins in critique, but refuses to stop there.
Students are asked to move from encounter to analysis, from analysis toward
grounded reimagination, toward ideas that can be discussed, implemented, and
assessed. Hence, the program not being a classic ethnographic field school
built around observation of “others.” Instead, we use the strengths of ethnographic
attention—astute participant observation, fieldnotes, attention to details—but
use those tools in collaboration with the local community to reimagine alternative
futures we can put in place together.
Program structure:
three four-week blocks (modular)
Block A (May
18–June 12): Language and Cultural Introduction (optional).
Block A is a
four-week foundation designed to help students arrive with functional Italian
for everyday life and later fieldwork: navigating shops and markets, speaking
with hosts, understanding the rhythms of town life, and building enough
linguistic confidence to participate more fully in what follows. Block A is
being planned in either Vasto or Bologna, and the final location
will shape the precise accommodation model for this portion.
Block B (June 22–July 17): Reimagining the Economy (core field
school)
This
is the heart of the program: a four-week intensive field school based in
Molise/Abruzzo with excursions and field engagement. The first week establishes
the conceptual spine through seminar-style discussions that place depopulation,
“inner areas,” alternative economies, and lived forms of change into
conversation. The second week is the science/field-methods week described
above. The final two weeks return to the program’s central question—experiencing
how different worlds are sustained and how alternatives emerge—through
structured visits and engagements with farmers, small producers, homesteads, permaculture-oriented
projects, cultural initiatives, and municipal/regional actors. Block B culminates
in a collective projects shared with partners. This is where the program
becomes not only “learning,” but a disciplined attempt to produce a
reimaginative output from lived experience—something that can be discussed,
critiqued, and implemented.
Block
C is for students who want to remain and get deeper into the community’s
dynamics and cultural aspects (this runs through festival season), and/or be a
part of the aibia’s existing research and/or development programs.
This block is designed to bring students deeper into the community; and as a
mentored residency period, where students work on projects collectively
(perhaps personalizing aspects of it) in dialogue with aibia and local
collaborators. Current directions include work connected to regenerative
land and water practices on aibia’s land, water/rain retention
questions in town, exploring, reimagining, and rejuvenating aibia and
the town’s infrastructure, and ethnographic inquiry into
depopulation and rural futures.
Accommodation and Daily
Life
Housing and daily logistics differ by block,
but within the program’s Molise-based core, Blocks B and C, aibia
organizes accommodation, provides meals (including excursions), and
local transport. Block A’s accommodation/meals model will be confirmed once
the location model is finalized (Vasto or Bologna).
Costs and Accessibility
(final figures forthcoming)
Exact fees will be published once cohort sizes and final accommodation arrangements are confirmed, though in the past have ranged from 55-75 euros per day for the full three-month program, and 95-115 euros per day for only Block B – the ‘reimagining’ program. The program will be offered as a full-program package as well as with modular pricing per block. A need-based scholarship structure is planned, and we encourage anyone interested – regardless of their financial situation – to send us an email to inquire about options for inclusion.
Who is this for?
If
you are looking for a program that will simply confirm what you already
believe, aibia is not that. If you are looking for a program that will
ask you to see differently—through immersion, through disciplined attention to
both social and ecological realities, and through a collective and experiential
process of reimagining—then this is your invitation to challenge yourself.
Expressions of interest and Next Steps:
Please
email and questions and expressions of interest to aibia.global@gmail.com, introducing
who you are and why you would like to be a part of this program, by January 31st.
Once we gauge the interest level, we will follow up with exact costs,
scholarship opportunities, and any additional application and placement
procedures.
For
more information, please visit our website at www.aibia.org
