Young priest turns forsaken farm into paradise homestead

Five years ago Catholic priest Johannes Schwarz left his parish to withdraw for a few years in the Italian Alps (in the shadow of his beloved Monte Viso). He bought an old rustico stone farm building for 20, 000 euros and transformed it into his mountaintop hermitage. Inspired by the early Christian desert hermits from the 200s and 300s when some people went into the deserts of Egypt and Palestine searching for a more rigorous life, Schwarz found something remote: he has only one fulltime neighbor on the entire mountainside and in winter, he often has to snowshoe for a couple hours just to buy food and supplies. To be as selfsufficient as possible, he makes his own bread and stores plenty of potatoes which he grows using Ruth Stout s NoWork gardening method. To grow much of his own fruit and produce, he terraced the steep hillside (using stones from the area) to create microclimates. You try to build walls that have southern expo