Stefano Pisani became mayor of Pollica, a small community in the region of Cilento, in southern Italy, under the worst possible circumstances. Fifteen years ago, his predecessor, Angelo Vassallo, was assassinated—mowed down by nine bullets—after attempting to crack down on the drug trade. “For the first few hours, I thought, This is not my mission,” Pisani, who had been Vassallo’s deputy, recalled recently.

Very quickly, Pisani changed his mind, realizing that if he didn’t carry on Vassallo’s efforts at revitalization then no one would. Pollica, which is both a village and the name of the larger administrative community, is made up of rugged mountains and dramatic coastline, and it has a long-standing tradition of farming, viniculture, and seafaring: Vassallo had been known locally as “the fisherman mayor,” on account of his extra-political profession. Its villages include Acciaroli, a seaside spot where Hemingway is said to have hung out in the nineteen-fifties, celebrated for its high percentage of centenarians, and Pioppi, where, beginning in the sixties, the American physiologist Ancel Keys researched the Mediterranean diet, publishing with his wife, Margaret Keys, a best-selling book, “How to Eat Well and Stay Well the Mediterranean Way,” that helped put olive oil firmly on the American dinner table. But, as Pisani points out, this latter-day acknowledgment of his region’s salutary properties has ancient precursors: two and a half millennia ago, Cilento was part of Magna Graecia, with the philosopher Parmenides theorizing the balance between humans and nature in Elea, a Greek settlement ten miles down the coast.

Pisani, who is fifty, lives with his family in Cannicchio, the hillside hamlet in which he grew up; but he could be called “the consultant mayor,” having left the region after university to work in business administration in Naples and Rome. Although proud of Pollica’s reputation for super-agers, Pisani is focussed on the younger generations. “For me, it is most important to say to the youth, ‘Yes, go abroad, get your experience, and return to Pollica, because we need innovation,’ ” he said. He has established the Angelo Vassallo Center for Mediterranean Diet Studies, where, in a thirteenth-century castle, Sara Roversi, a faculty member at the University of Bologna and the founder of the nonprofit Future Food Institute, heads the Paideia Campus, teaching integral ecology and heritage know-how to high-school students, and also hosting visitors from the food industry. Of Pisani and his commitment to Cilento, Roversi said, “He’s like a priest—a person who has decided to dedicate his life to this.”

From Pisani’s perspective, the Mediterranean diet is about far more than comestibles. “Many people have said, ‘You can choose the right diet, so you live long and well’—it’s not true,” he said. “If you want to live long and well, you decide to live in a place where the environment and humans have identified the right equilibrium.” The Mediterranean diet might better be thought of as an entire system: the maintenance of biodiversity through regenerative farming; the transmission of cultural knowledge, including cooking; the stewardship of the sea—this was the first region in Italy to start rewarding fishermen for salvaging plastic from the waves, rather than fining them for dumping it harborside—and the tradition of conviviality. Last month, more than six hundred people ate lunch together on trestle tables that snaked through the cobbled streets of Acciaroli, to celebrate fifteen years since Unesco designated the Mediterranean diet part of Italy’s intangible cultural heritage. Among Pisani’s innovations is a municipal mountaintop vineyard. “Why does the municipality produce wine? Because the mayor is crazy?” Pisani said. “The mayor is crazy—it’s true. But we do it to analyze the approach to produce a good wine and renew the soil, and create a new opportunity for the young.”

Earlier this month, Pisani and Roversi were at the United Nations, for the declaration of November 16th as International Mediterranean Diet Day, as well as to promote Pollica, not so much as a destination for tourism—mention to Pisani the overly Instagrammed Amalfi Coast, Cilento’s neighbor to the north, and he makes a face as if he had swigged a mouthful of corked Fiano—but as a model for the harmonious balance between a population and its locale. A hoped-for mayor-to-mayor-elect convivium with Zohran Mamdani wasn’t possible—next time—but Pisani and Roversi did manage to dine at Flora, a restaurant in Park Slope that is run by transplants from Cilento, where they ate linguine and broccoli rabe with colatura di alici di menaica, a condiment made from anchovies. Pisani’s message to the city, and to the United Nations, is that the Pollica approach can be applied anywhere, even in regions where the water is less than crystalline and the government doesn’t have its own vineyard. “We are convinced that the resources of the planet are not in the big city but in the marginal areas,” Pisani said. “Pollica is really the future of humanity.” ♦