Paper Short Abstract:

Through the analysis of two different cases, this paper will focus on truffle hunting in the wild and in truffle farms and how landscape can be reinterpreted and reimagined in both realities.

Paper Abstract:

Truffle hunting means seeking truffles in the wild or in a truffle farm. I present here two cases where local people engage with the landscape reinterpreting and reimagining it through truffle.

The first describes truffle hunting in the woods around Alba, Piedmont, Italy, the centre of the culture of the white truffle, as well as the Unesco protected vineyards landscapes, since 2014. The traditional truffle hunting practice in the local woods has been menaced since the powerful wine industry has destroyed almost the entire original forests. The inscription of the “truffle hunting and extraction in Italy” in the Unesco list of intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2021, doesn’t seem to work as counterpower for the hegemonic forces that have totally modified the landscape obliging the truffle hunters to hunt in inaccesible areas or to buy their own lands in order to create reserves to protect the woods and the truffle.

The second case refers to the area around the village of Sarrión, in Aragon, Spain, now the biggest producing area of black truffle in the world. The expansion of truffle farms has been modifying the landscape during the last thirty years from non productive land to “new forests” where trees have been inoculated with tuber melanosporum spores in order to produce truffles, now considered as the support to the economic growth of the area. These forests have to be considered as a reinterpretation of the Landscape made by the local inhabitants, who are both farmers and truffle hunters.