Save
There is no sound on the island, apart from the distant voices of the inmates in the fields or a tractor making its way up the hill. Everything is swallowed by the wind. It’s a gentle Mediterranean breeze that cools the land and brings salt from the sea. The salt gets everywhere.
This is Gorgona, a small, dusty outcrop that rises from the glistening sea in the Tuscan archipelago, about 40 km off the coast of Livorno. Approaching it by boat, you’re greeted by a dilapidated but picturesque fishing village, the houses and buildings freshly painted in bright colours. It could be a typical Mediterranean island except this rock has a different story. It is a prison island, and for the inmates who live here, there is no way off.
Gorgona looks like an idyllic place to pass a sentence, and you might wonder what type of criminal is lucky enough to serve a sentence in a place like this. But this island serves as a sort of halfway house, a refuge where prisoners can come towards the end of their long sentences. Here they can find peace and even elements of freedom. But more importantly, Gorgona is a place where they can find work and dignity, and ultimately they can find themselves before they go back to the world.
The correctional facility on the island runs a rehabilitation programme for inmates in partnership with the esteemed Tuscan winery Frescobaldi. Prisoners can learn about the cultivation of grapes and winemaking while serving the remainder of their sentence. They produce a very limited number of bottles of Gorgona wine by Frescobaldi from Vermentino and Ansonica grapes, about nine thousand per year. The prisoners are employed by the Frescobaldi house, receiving a wage that they save. It allows them to make the right choices once they return to society.
Lamberto Frescobaldi, President of Frscobaldi Wines and the driving source behind the rehabilitation programme on Gorgona
“We hire the prisoners here, they join the Frescobaldi payroll,” says Lamberto Frescobaldi, president of Frescobaldi and the driving force behind the programme. “That allows them to have twenty, thirty, even forty thousand euros in their bank accounts. That is very important because when the step out of the prison, some of them are scared to leave, and when they have that money in their bank accounts, they are able to say ‘no’ to crime again.”
The reality is, that when people are released after serving long sentences, usually there are criminal gangs waiting for them. They are looking for people with certain skills and a kind of desperation - often they have nothing and no way to make money. According to Frescobaldi the average rate of recidivism in Italy is as high as 85%, but tor the people who pass through Gorgona it is 0%.
This year marks the 10th year that the Frescobaldi family have been involved with the correctional facility on Gorgona. The decade has seen many inmates pass through from high security facilities from all over Italy. As a rewards for good behaviour, prisoners can serve the last two or three years of their sentence on the island. Here they can learn what it means to work.
“It’s not a question of training people to produce a good berry, a good cluster or a good glass of wine,” says Frescobaldi. “You have to learn to do what you have to do. Out there, people do what they have to do because they have a family to support, they have school, the have social security to pay… only a small percentage do what they want to do. Most people do what they have to… and there’s nothing wrong with that."
“Years ago, one prisoner said to me: ‘I want to thank you. This is the first pay packet I have ever had in my life. I sent it home and I bought shoes for my kids'."
It was Frescobaldi that first received contact from the director of the prison on Gorgona during the usually dead month of August. The vineyards already existed on the island and the prison director was looking for a winery to work with the inmates. More out of curiosity than anything else, Frescobaldi made a trip to Gorgona, but when he saw the potential, not only for rehabilitation but for the wine to be a unique expression of the terroir, something stirred in him. He began to envision a project that could transform lives.
“This project means a lot to me. It allows me to give back,” he says. “I have been very lucky in my life and I want to share that with some other people. It also allows me to be patriotic, to do something for Italy. Everyone deserves a second chance, no matter what you have done in life, I really believe that."
“One prisoner I met, he told me that he was jailed because he got in a fight at a nightclub and he threw a punch. The other guy fell to the floor and he died. So that one moment, when he lost control it took 20 years of his life. That can happen to anyone. Some of the people are only here because of an accident of birth, they were born in the wrong place, at the wrong time. That could be you or me, so we must give people another chance at life.”
Once the project was up and running, the director shared with Frescobaldi that he had sent hundreds of requests to wineries all over Tuscany and beyond. Frescobaldi was the only one that responded.
For the inmates, the experience on Gorgona is transformative. There is an unusual dichotomy to them working between the rows of vines. Prisoners serving a long sentence for a serious crime display the acceptance of men who have lost all autonomy over their lives, and have spent every day for years reflecting on their life choices. And yet there is a hint of danger too, like a coiled spring, they have the potential to explode. They are vulnerable people, which is why a project like this can make such a world of difference.
An inmate tends the vines on the island of Gorgona
“It’s much better here,” says inmate Muhammad [not his real name]. “Before I was a prisoner on the Cotes d’Azur, it was a completely different experience. Here you are allowed to be a human."
“There is trust between the guards and the inmates,” he continues, brandishing a pair of secateurs. “Even these tools, these could be weapons in the wrong hands, but we are allowed to use them to do our work. I can sleep at night here. Before in the other prisons, I didn’t sleep for years.”
The relationship with the guards is different, but Gorgona is still a prison. The inmates are allowed out of their cells when they have tasks to do but otherwise they are under lock and key. The vendemmia, or wine harvest, though is a crucial time and the cell doors are swung open to allow the inmates to work the long hours gathering the grapes by hand as soon as they are perfectly ripe.
Everything is done by hand. The vines grow on terraces carved into the island’s steep slopes. The wine is made on the island in the winery known as the ‘garage’, where Frescobaldi oenologists make wine in a simple and traditional way. For the inmates, their whole lives are dedicated to the cultivation of grapes and the making of wine, it is the centre of their world while they are on the island.
“It’s an emotional moment when they roll the barrels down the hill and the crane lifts them onto the boat,” says one Frescobaldi oenologist. You wonder if it is the same for the inmates, when they step onto the boat and say goodbye to Gorgona, watching as the brightly coloured fishing village that was their home for years, disappears into the distance, the boat bound for the mainland and a new life.
Latest
