why Davide Lazzaretti

Arcidosso 6 november 1834 – Bagnore 18 august 1878

We have united under the name of Davide Lazzaretti inspired by the extraordinary community experience that developed around this historical figure on Monte Labbro in the last decades of 1800. Lazzaretti’s project guides some of the most central goals of our community cooperative, starting with the creation of a tight-knit network in order to unite the inhabitants of our municipality. This network will allow us to work in synergy with the territory and all it offers. Like the group gathered around Lazzaretti, we aim to diverge from the mainstream by focusing on cooperation and centralizing the needs of our community. We wish to enhance the distinctive abilities of each individual, transforming them into abundance within everyone’s reach.

Father Ernesto Balducci writes in his book “The Dream of a Thing” also in reference to Davide Lazzaretti’s experience:

“No change is to be considered positive if it obeys only economic and technological means, without introducing itself, with respect, into the anthropological structure that a human group has inherited for centuries … popular culture, the one that seemed relegated to the archives, contains within itself perspectives that, instead, are completely measured on the new dimensions of our historical responsibility … in the submerged memories are hidden messages suitable for the future … ”

Balducci’s description of the community experience of the Giurisdavidic group reflects and inspires the aims of our cooperative project:

“Ruined by the effects of the market economy, generalized in Italy after its unification, the peasants reacted by creating a community (…) a sign of a possibility that, if implemented, would radically subvert the hierarchy of privileges. (…) There was the tangible demonstration of how man can live not in competition with other man, but in a free cooperation, in a joyful sharing of the goods of the earth and the goods of the spirit”.

If today we are capable of dreaming of a future without continuity with the present, totally different from the one projected to us by the builders of history, it is precisely because it is in that vanished humanity that our roots lie.

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