The Garfagnana is a land of mountains, forests and stone villages tucked between the Apuan Alps and the Tuscan-Emilian Apennines. It is also a land of departures.

From the 19th century through the decades that followed, between 70,000 and 100,000 people left this corner of Tuscany. Men and women from an overwhelmingly rural society crossed oceans in search of work, opportunity and a future.

Today, as an episode of Rai’s Radici d’Italia* devoted to this wild land shows, their descendants are beginning to make the journey in the opposite direction.

In San Romano in Garfagnana, Cristina Fabrizi has come looking for the roots of a man named Filippo Piazzolla. The surname suggests a famous connection, but Filippo is quick to make one thing clear: He is not related to Astor Piazzolla, the legendary Argentine musician.

He simply believes his own family may have originated here.

It is a familiar impulse in the Garfagnana, where emigration once emptied villages but never severed their ties to the people who left.

“The descendants of Italian emigrants feel this very strongly,” Cristina says. “They want to know who they are and where their ancestors came from.”

A Land People Fought to Control

To understand why so many people left — and why so many descendants now want to return — it helps us to understand the land itself.

The Garfagnana is narrow and mountainous, enclosed by two major ranges. It can feel hidden, but historically it was anything but forgotten. It was a frontier, a crossroads and a territory coveted by competing powers.

Dukes, armies and ruling families fought for control of their valleys and passes. The landscape still carries the evidence: fortresses, towers, churches and fortified villages rising above the forests.

At Castelnuovo di Garfagnana, one of those rulers was Ludovico Ariosto, the great Renaissance poet. As governor for the Este family, Ariosto reportedly found the remote territory difficult to govern and longed for Ferrara.

From his seat of power, Rocca di Castelnuovo, he worked on the poem that would become his masterpiece, Orlando Furioso.

The Garfagnana’s fortifications are still standing. The Fortress of Mont’Alfonso rises above Castelnuovo, while the Fortress of Verrucole towers over the mountains near San Romano.

At Verrucole, the past is not simply displayed. It is staged, touched and brought back to life.

Visitors can see medieval weapons and armor, enter the kitchens of the ancient fortress and even operate a reconstructed trebuchet. An archaeological park offers children, and school groups a chance to experience medieval life through cooking, calligraphy, miniature painting and simulated sieges.

“History is not just the pages in a book, the dates, the names, the Popes and Emperors,” one of the guides explains. “It is also everyday life.”

From a Wound to a Bridge

For generations, however, everyday life in the Garfagnana meant leaving.

The great exodus was particularly painful because entire families departed, taking with them workers, skills and knowledge that agricultural communities depended on.

For a long time, emigration was remembered as an open wound.

Today, local officials and cultural organizations are trying to see it differently.

The Parco Appennino nel Mondo project, launched in 2008, was created to reconnect the region with descendants of emigrants around the world. The program now reaches people in Australia, Argentina, Brazil, the United States and elsewhere in Europe, including descendants in the fourth and fifth generations.

Many of them have never lived here.

Yet the attachment can be remarkably strong.

A video message from Perth, Australia, offers a glimpse of that connection. Marisa Pieri says her parents emigrated in the 1950s. She still returns whenever she can, walking the streets and forests of the Garfagnana as her father, Alfredo, once did.

Her son Dylan has inherited the same attachment. He has already visited three times and spent six months in Italy studying and getting to know his roots.

For people like them, the region has created what it calls “affective citizenship.”

It is not a legal status or a passport, but a symbolic recognition of belonging — a way of recognizing descendants who have kept their family connection alive.

“My First Language Was Garfagnino”

Anna Bacci knows what that connection feels like.

Her grandfather left first for Australia. Her grandmother followed in 1952 with two unmarried sons. Anna’s parents went in 1955 with their children. The voyage took 30 days.

Anna was born in Australia in 1959.

She lived there until she was 20, when she returned to the Garfagnana with her parents and one of her sisters.

And stayed.

“I was already in love with the Garfagnana,” she says. “Even when I was 11, I used to say that when I grew up I would get married and live in Italy.”

The language of home traveled with her.

“What did you speak at home in Australia?” she is asked.

“Italian. My first language was Italian. Garfagnino, really.”

Her story captures something that statistics cannot: Emigration may move a family across the world, but it does not necessarily erase the place it came from.

Sometimes the opposite happens. Distance turns a village into an idea, and the idea becomes something the next generation wants to recover.

A Wild Corner of the Apennines

The Garfagnana’s landscape is part of that inheritance.

At the Orecchiella Nature Park, one of the wildest areas of the Tuscan Apennines, forests of fir, beech and chestnut trees shelter deer, roe deer, mouflon, wolves and golden eagles.

The park has trails for families as well as demanding routes for experienced hikers, along with e-bike excursions and a botanical garden containing about 400 species from the Garfagnana and the wider Tuscan-Emilian Apennines.

Even in the winter, the garden reveals the adaptations that allow its plants to survive.

An English holly, for example, has prickly leaves lower down and smooth-edged leaves higher up. The difference is a defense mechanism: Herbivores tend to feed at lower levels, so the plant protects itself where it is most vulnerable.

By late May, the garden’s peonies are in bloom. The flower is its symbol.

It is another reminder that the Garfagnana’s treasures are often quiet ones — things that take time to notice.

From Garfagnana to Argentina

Perhaps the most extraordinary example of the region’s reach across the world is hidden in the story of Astor Piazzolla.

For years, the famous musician’s Italian origins were associated mainly with his father’s family, which came from Trani in Puglia.

But his mother’s roots lead here.

Assunta Manetti was born into a family from Massa Sassorosso, in the Garfagnana. Her parents, Clelia Bertolani and Luigi Manetti, married there in 1888 before leaving for Argentina in search of a better life.

They settled in Mar del Plata.

Their daughter Assunta would later meet Vicente Piazzolla, whose family came from southern Italy. Their son, Astor, was born in Mar del Plata in 1921.

Today, Massa Sassorosso tells that story through a small exhibition route — a paseo, borrowing the Argentine word — that traces the journey from this mountain village to Argentina.

Photographs donated by the Astor Piazzolla Foundation in Buenos Aires show Assunta, young Astor and his father.

The story is personal, but it is also emblematic.

One family leaves the mountains. A child is born across the ocean. That child changes music forever. And decades later, his family’s story returns to the village from which it began.

The Road Eventually Leads to the Table

By the end of the journey, the Garfagnana’s history has become hungry work.

The smell of burning wood and roasting chestnuts leads to Casone di Profecchia, where the reward is pappardelle.

The dough is made with eggs and flour and worked by hand. The sauce begins with garlic, celery, onion and carrot, followed by mushrooms and meat. Everything cooks slowly.

Very slowly.

“In our cooking, time is everything,” the chef says. “You have to follow it with love.”

The finished pappardelle are not cut with a knife. The fresh sheet of pasta is stretched and torn by hand before going into the pot — a traditional technique that gives the dish its distinctive shape.

Then comes the sauce, cooked until the mushrooms are tender and the flavors have concentrated.

After hours of waiting, lunch is suddenly simple: pasta, sauce, a wooden table and the people around it.

It is perhaps the most fitting ending for a journey about roots.

Garfagnana has spent centuries sending people away. Their ships sailed for Australia, Argentina, the Americas and beyond. Their children grew up speaking other languages and living in other continents.

But the stories came back.

Sometimes through a family tree. Sometimes through an old photograph or a place name. Sometimes through a young descendant searching for an ancestor he never knew.

And sometimes, simply, through a plate of pasta.

In Garfagnana, roots do not seem to disappear when they cross an ocean. They wait.

*Radici d’Italia is a Rai television series produced as part of the “Roots Tourism” initiative promoted by Italy’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation and funded by the European Union’s NextGenerationEU program.