Living in the tumult of the city, who among us hasn’t wondered if we’re really marching to the beat of our own drum?
Naples’ nightlife brought Francesca Tortorelli and Eliza Cox together in 2020. But the couple, a video editor from a town near Salerno and an English teacher from Nottingham, became disenchanted with the big city, in contrast to the fulfilment they found away on camping trips.
The determined duo decided to act on their dissatisfaction. In September 2022, they embarked on a year of travelling and volunteering in Europe while refining their dream of opening up an eco-lodge in southern Italy.
“It broke life down to the simple things,” Eliza (23) says of those experiences on eco-retreats. “Just those simple rhythms of life with all the other chaos and drama taken away, in a community of other volunteers. It was a really, really special experience and taught us a lot.”
Now living in the small town of Perdifumo in south-west Italy, they’re working towards their goal while connecting with the local community to make their future destination as inclusive and sustainable as possible.
We caught up with Francesca and Eliza - aka ‘Growing Greener’ - to hear about their journey and what it takes to create a truly communal tourism experience.
Though they tuned into their feelings, the pair didn’t uproot on an impulse. It took six months of preparation and research to find the best way to travel on a budget, Francesca (30) explains.
They used a website called Worldpackers where hosts offer opportunities for travellers to stay and eat in exchange for five hours of work a day.
In Growing Greener’s case, this wasn’t just a chance to meet like-minded travellers on a long-term adventure; they also gathered valuable skills for their future project.
In Portugal, the couple stayed at an off-grid eco-retreat farm in Aljezur, sleeping in a tent while getting stuck into a variety of jobs. Eliza foraged for fruit in the forest and cooked for the other volunteers, while Francesca cleaned and prepared breakfast for guests.
Their next stop was an organic farm in France where they learned about growing vegetables and agriculture, helping to plant a ‘food forest’ of over 150 trees.
They were also tasked with looking after chickens and a herd of goats which had recently joined the family: “something completely new and foreign, for a video editor and an English teacher living in a city, going to the middle of nature and everything,” Eliza recalls.
Life on the road wasn’t always easy. “It can be quite intense, difficult, not having personal space,” the bilingual couple say, weaving in and out of each other’s sentences, “but it was a real experience where we grew a lot.”
“It was one of the best years of my life,” says Francesca. “It
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Impressionism, the movement that forever marked the history of art, is now 150 years old, almost to the day. To celebrate the anniversary, the Musee d’Orsay in Paris together with the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., just opened a very anticipated exhibition, Paris 1874 Inventing impressionism,where spectators have the chance to feel as if they were there for the movement’s birth.
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The historic Troy Laundry Building — a Colonial Revival-style brick warehouse sitting at 1025 S.E. Pine Street in Portland, Oregon — has begun a new iteration. Constructed in 1913, the Buckman neighborhood building was an industrial laundry facility until 1983, served as an artist co-op for a few decades, and was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1989.
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This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Nadia Crevecoeur, a 26-year-old project manager from New York who traveled to and lived in many countries, including China, Portugal, Ireland, Germany, France, Denmark, and Italy, before moving back to the US in 2023. The following has been edited for length and clarity.