Museum gardening: reawakening eco-awareness

By Cecilia Seppia
Vatican News
April 5, 2022

From the Royal Palace of Caserta to the Archeological Park of Pompei, to the Campano Amphitheater in Capua, thanks to the Horticultura project, integral ecology is making its way into southern Italy’s Terra dei Fuochi, or ‘Land of Fire’, the reign of eco-mafias, replacing squalor with beauty, the exploitation of the land with agriculture, and helping children learn how to care for the environment.

During the first tough months of the pandemic, confined to online schooling, the children of the Caserta area waited anxiously in front of their computer screens for the Horticultura hour, impatient to discover, together with teachers, the secrets and ancient techniques of agriculture. To help them on this journey of environmental education, each of them had received a magic box, an Orto Box, containing everything they needed to create and take care of a vegetable garden: spades, hoes, lenses that transform cell phones into microscopes, magnets, bags with three types of soil differing in permeability and therefore in cultivable products, seeds, fertilizers, composts, plus educational guidelines to follow the experiments. After a long time, today they are back to getting their hands dirty in the best possible way: together with their classmates, in the open air, in museum gardens, the first created in Italy thanks to a truly unique initiative.

Read the full article here.