Fabrizio Fenu
Products: dried figs
Location: Domus de Maria – Chia (pronounced with a hard k)
Extension: no own land. Some 70 trees rented from various farmers
Employs: Himself
When Fabrizio Fenu, together with his wife and two children, moved back to Sardinia from Japan, barely anyone one on the island was producing dried figs commercially.
Fabrizio was born in Carbonia, a foundation town in southwestern Sardinia, built under fascism to settle workers from Italy and Sardinia for exploiting the nearby coal mines. He left the island for England and Japan, first working as an … in the university library of … and then helping his fathers in law in their grocery store, importing also Sardinian products to sell there.
After the COVID pandemic, he decided to move back with his family and work with the land. In the village of Domus de Maria, where he settled, he had no land and little prospects of buying some. Plots on the fertile coastal plain there are expensive, possibly because of now-halted but always impending touristic development.
Not having land did not stop him: many people, due to age or different prospects, do not tend to their own, so he started renting fig trees on other people’s allotments.
The black fig of Chia has large fruits, violet when ripe. It produces a first crop in June and a second at the end of August/beginning of September.
Author: Fabrizio Fenu
© Fabrizio Fenu
These are mature trees, often decades or centuries old, all of the local black variety: niedda de Chia. He prunes the plants when needed and collects the figs by himself. They crop first in June and then again between August and September. He submits the trees to no fertilization or treatment. The soil below the plants is often managed by the other farmers CHECK THIS, who mow the grass and leave the biomass on the ground, to enrich it but decrease fire hazards.
Fabrizio’s laboratory, in the village of Domus de María. Here he transforms figs …
Author: Giuseppe Congiu
© Aristeu
Fabrizio sells a part of the figs fresh, another he transforms to jams, together with lemons and other fruits from the area. Finally, a part is dried in the sun, before being briefly heated in a oven at 50 °C, a process that kills any parasite that might have nested in the fruits.
He sells his products in stands and online, all over the EU, through his small webshop.
Products
Nessun farmer trovato.