Fiego – Fattoria brigantesca was born in 2016, according to the register of companies of the chamber of commerce. But its story is more than a century old. In 1901 the priest Michele Talarico bought one hundred hectares of land to each of his brothers, Annibale and Giovanni.

The plot was part of a fiefdom that extended to the towns of Scigliano and Martirano. The two founding brothers married two sisters, Tommasina and Maria Rizzuti, and the land thus became their dowry. From Giovanni’s marriage were born Emanuele and Ercolino, who inherited the Fiego (“hjegu”, according to the local pronunciation). On the official maps, this name does not exist, it is reported instead “Fego”, whose etymology is probably due to a dialectal variant of the word “feud”. The river that flows inside the property is also called in the same way. The entire land was cultivated with all kinds of fruit and vegetables: wheat, cabbage, corn, courgettes, aubergines, peppers, tomatoes, beans, chicory and of course the Sila queens, the chestnut and the potato.

Everything grows lush, thanks to the good soil and spring water. The trees ripen cherries, apples, pears and nuts. Tasty trouts dart in the Fego river, the water mill grinds the flour, in the “pastillara” the chestnuts are dried and the cows produce nice fat milk, from which the grandfather Ercole makes exquisite pecorino, caciocavallo, and ricottas. Every winter, land overlooking the Ionian Sea was rented to allow the herds to transhumance.

The abundant crops feed families with numerous children and are sold in the marine markets, in Catanzaro. In subsequent divisions between heirs, the fund loses its original extension and is fragmented into smaller plots.

Through Giovanni, son of Ercolino, Fiego reaches the fourth generation. It was the first-born Rosaria Talarico, when she was five years old, who extracted the note with the property that her family had in front of the notary. The fate of the earth passes from her small hands. Now she has turned it into a brigand farm: a tribute to the memory of the ancestors who, with their work, had made the valley of Fiego into a garden.