La Restanza: Mountain Stories Between Tuscany and Emilia

Colognole Farmers’ Cultural Association

Pontassieve (Italy)

May 30th, 2026

This is an initiative of La Leggera within the Creative Europe Tramontana IV project.

On 30 May, the documentary film “La Restanza: Mountain Stories Between Tuscany and Emilia”, directed by Francesco Tomé, was shown to the public. The filmmaker attended the screening and participated in a discussion with the audience afterwards.

Vito Teti, a Calabrian anthropologist, coined the term “restanza”, defining it as the right to both leave and stay, to build a new sense of belonging to a place and to oneself. He claims that restanza feels like being both rooted and disoriented in a place where one feels protected and rejuvenated.

In a time of migration and the need to create new senses of belonging, restanza is a contemporary phenomenon. Those who “stay” in their place of origin and live, traverse and interpret it amidst a whirlwind of change require a new sense of belonging and the creation of new communities. The pandemic, the climate emergency and large-scale migration are changing our relationship to death, space and others, and the resulting need for new ways of life is affecting those who leave and those who stay. Today, many superficial and rhetorical idealisations of life in small towns abound.

The brutal abandonment eradicates the practices of remembrance and hope among those who stayed. “Restanza” affects cities, suburbs and villages. It is not passive or a choice of ease, but a dynamic, creative process which might regenerate both the place and its people.

Francesco Tomè, the documentary’s director, explores this concept during a journey through the high plateaus between the Apuan Alps and the Tuscan-Emilian Apennines, where some choose to stay or leave, defying abandonment out of love for the mountains. Amid slow rhythms, farm work, and a lack of services, the “restanza” becomes an act of silent and radical resistance. A raw, unvarnished narrative that gives a voice to those who have chosen life at high altitude as a common good worth defending.