Edible Estate #10: Rome at Ex-SNIA community center

…was the first stop this afternoon from Fiumicino where I was picked up by my friend Marco (who had been involved with the rooftop Edible Estate at SALT in Istanbul) where it was gratifying to see the garden welcomed and cared for at it’s new community center home (for local residents, unemployed, and immigrants – situated in an abandoned factory near Termini, where the garden moved after it’s original home on my roof terrace at the American Academy in Rome) up close and personal, one year later, evolving and growing with it’s original resourceful spirit of using what is immediately available, expanding well beyond it’s original wooden fruit crate containers into other found materials like pallets and scavenged wood boards for raised beds – which was all inspected before a meeting and video interview with a couple of young architecture students who are doing a report on the neighborhood and garden for their class, and finally back on the road for the two and half hour dramatic drive through the Appenine Mountains on our way to the Abruzzian farm Pollinaria where the European edition of Domestic Integrities will officially begin, while I’m in residence for the next ten days.