Driving through Maccarese you will pass massive fields of almonds and corn and cherries and beans and barley and every green vegetable imaginable. Every few miles you’ll see homey, street side fruit and vegetable stands where you get the most natural, freshest produce at reasonable prices. Little Maccarese (pop. 5,100) is home to the largest farm in Italy. In the late 1920s, a failed reclamation project by financial investors made the land useless. But in 1932, Italian leader Benito Mussolini reclaimed the land and redeveloped it. He shipped in workers from Mantua and Veneto who cultivated the fields, planted vineyards and managed the dairy cows. 

Soon, Maccarese became the showcase of Italian agriculture. In 1998, the Benetton brothers bought the company which owned 17 square miles and Castello del San Giorgio for 94 billion lire (€48.5 million). Today the farmland covers 3,000 hectares (7,400 acres), with 2,420 semi-irrigated crops. More than 2,700 cattle produce 4,200 liters of milk a day. The Italian food website Arte Cibo called Maccarese an “agricultural paradise.”