The pensioner, calm and athletically built, welcomes you to Arcanu Farm with the most considerate hospitality. Whilst his discreet wife Lisabetta prepares a hearty snack for you, he takes you off on a guided tour, telling you that as far as the eye can see, or almost, everything belongs to him. And a second later, he tells you that it all amounts to nothing – that none of it really belongs to him, any more than the desert belongs to the Tuaregs or the steppe to the Mongols; that he is only its guardian. He didn’t inherit this land, because inheriting it would mean that he owned it, that he could secede it, sell it, chop it into pieces; no, Cassanu Idrissi explains to you, pointing out the peak of Capu di a Vita with his stick, this land has been entrusted to him, he simply holds responsibility for it. Then, while Lisabetta brings you a chestnut tea and fiadone and canistrelli with almonds and raisins, Cassanu unfolds some old maps on the table, and deeds of ownership, some dating back to the days of Pascal Paoli, Sampiero Corso or Napoleon Bonaparte, and announces that they barely matter. According to him, the recent planning documents, which the administration enjoys accumulating, have no greater legitimacy. In the end, they only represent boundaries drawn by human beings, lines usually drawn on large sheets of paper, as if men passing through this earth could possess a single grain of sand, drop of water or blade of grass and take it with them to the beyond. As if, in the event that by the greatest of miracles paradise did exist, you could get into it with all your suitcases. As if the earth wasn’t going to go on existing after us. Because if water and fire, the roots of the trees and the winds are capable of bringing down even the greatest walls, of cracking Genoese towers and eating away at the stone bridges over rushing torrents, then what can they do to these lines drawn in pen on a piece of paper? Nature doesn’t care about the heritage we claim to protect in its name.

So, the shepherd continues, growing heated and waving his arms around, while his wife protects the glasses and cups, you can draw zones, perimeters and boundaries as much as you like, divide up the oceans and the ice floes, the heavens and the stars, the mountains and the rivers, decide who each pebble belongs to, each olive stone and each columbine petal if that’s what takes your fancy, what makes you feel important and gives meaning to your life, but you won’t change this truth one whit: the land is only entrusted to us. My land is entrusted to me. And no human law will ever make me give up my duty to return it in the condition I found it in.