The guest of this week’s episode is not a photographer, but we thought the story she wanted to tell deserved recognition.

The reason we travel to and photograph certain locations is because we love them and we would do anything to preserve them. High on the list of most-loved places for us sits the Cinque Terre region in north-western Italy.

This region is strikingly beautiful and extremely fragile. What not many people know is that the landscape there has been shaped by millennia of farming grapes and olives on narrow terraces, held together on the side of precipitous mountains by dry-stone walls.

Maintaining and constantly rebuilding those walls is the key to avoiding the destruction of the villages below, that we so love to photograph, by the elements.

This is why, when we heard about the Grapes & Heroes campaign, whose aim is to help the winemakers maintain those walls, we immediately wanted to help spread the word.

So one day Ugo, who has been photographing the Cinque Terre for years, sat down on the phone with one of the people behind the campaign, Amy Inman.

Amy is an American who fell in love with the Cinque Terre and has been living in Riomaggiore for the last seventeen years, so she knows the area very well. We spoke at length about Grapes & Heroes, but also about what makes the Cinque Terre such a unique place and what needs to be done to preserve it in the face of changing tourism trends.

You can find more about Amy at her blog, Cinque Terre Insider.

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