The Richini alle Vagine farm is located on the heights overlooking Levanto and Monterosso al Mare, in the municipality of Levanto, at an altitude of 680 metres, alone, in the midst of chestnut and holm oak woods. These are localities where the presence of castles reveals human presence since prehistoric times. After the Roman colonization, which valorised the port and traced the communication lines favoring the connection with Luni, Piacenza and Parma through the Centocroci Pass, and with Genoa through the Bracco Pass, an era of involution and division began which brought the Zolasco family to dominate the upper Levanto valley, Bonassola Frattura, and the Da Passano to have the fiefdom of the Borgo and the lower valley. With the thirteenth-century convention between the men of the Borgo and those of the Valley, the two communities. while maintaining their own identity, they adopted a single statute giving rise to a process of integration which, over time, led to a loss of importance of the mountain principals. Of these, the base of the Torrione del Castello degli Zolasco remains, not far from the farm. In more recent times, the farm, incorporated into the properties of the Richini family, Genoese nobles who in Levanto in the 1700s competed with the Marquises Sauli for the primacy of the highest land income (250,000 Genoese Lire in 1759, a billionaire income today) , also had the function of staging post for the caravans which carried this and other goods inland along the Via del Sale: to Varese Ligure and from there to Piacenza and Parma (the last sharecroppers, Messrs. Medone, remember that the their grandfather indicated a part of the current building as a salt warehouse). After ownership of the land passed to the Schiaffino family of Levanto, we are witnessing a period of relative prosperity, in a panorama of general poverty. Three generations of the same family lived together on the farm, up to a total of 16 people. The main productions, mainly organized with a view to self-consumption, consisted of wheat, potatoes, dried legumes, cheese skins, chestnuts, vegetables, wine, fruit and every product of livestock breeding: sheep, pigs, cows, poultry, etc… . The Levantese, especially during the war, used to say that at the Fattoria you could always find a bowl of soup and a wheat loaf or a chestnut focaccia, but that it was equally certain that not a single soldo would be found. After the war, the lack of practicable roads, of the electric, hydraulic and telephone networks leads to a rapid depopulation of the eastern mountains: the men go to sail or work on the railway or at the military arsenal of La Spezia, the women go to work in the hotels and in the families of vacationers and wealthy locals.