This Sicilian community has endured for centuries. Can it survive a changing climate?

Giorgia Caruso always imagined her children one day inheriting the farm her family has tended for three generations.   Her daughters would do more than produce organic meat and dairy. They would continue a way of life central to Piana degli Albanesi, a community founded 500 years ago . Perched on a fertile plateau in the mountains south of Palermo, the town has long provided much of the wheat and dairy central to Sicily’s agricultural traditions. Caruso hoped to see her children carry those traditions on. “I have two daughters I wished could take over our farming business one day, which is like our third child,” Caruso said with teary eyes as she tended the last of the family’s livestock.  Now she’d like to see them build their lives somewhere safer.  A flock of sheep graze in a vineyard near Piana degli Albanesi, Sicily, Italy, in October 2017. De Agostini Picture Library / One day in late July three years ago, flames as high as a three-story building engulfed the family’s fields and threatened their home. Caruso and her husband Vito lost several acres of land and almost two dozen sheep, making it difficult to imagine their daughters taking over a business that may no longer exist in a few years. “Many times we’ve thought of resettling to a safer area, even abroad,” she said. “But it’s just so hard to pack up and leave our homeland.” Caruso’s family is not alone in facing that decision. A growing number of residents are questioning whether they can continue working the land that has sustained the Arbëreshë, as Italy’s Albanian ethnic minority is known, for five centuries.  Piana is subject to a microclimate marked , which is warming 20 percent faster than the global average. Summertime temperatures have averaged 85 degrees Fahrenheit over the past decade, with little to no rain. Sicily accounts for nearly half of Italy’s wildfires, and blazes struck in or around Piana in four of the last six years, displacing more than 100 people in 2021 and damaging several homes this past summer. Firefighting operations took place on the ground and from the air after a wildfire broke out in the town of Piana degli Albanesi, near the city of Palermo in Sicily, Italy, in August 2025. Alberto Lo Bianco / Anadolu via ​​ As farming — the town’s main source of income — grows more precarious, people are leaving. Piana has lost nearly 17 percent of its population since 2015.