When nature traces a new fate
“My second life started with an bear.” With these words Fulco Pratesi, founder of WWF Italia who disappeared at 90 in a Roman clinic, loved to tell the moment that radically transformed his existence and, consequently, the history of Italian environmentalism.
It was September 1963, in the remote forests of Anatolia, in Türkiye. A 29 -year -old young Roman architect, with a passion for hunting, suddenly found himself face to face with an bear accompanied by his three puppies. What for many hunters would have been just an anecdote to tell, for Pratesi represented a real inner electrocution.
From hunter to nature protector
“It was a dazzling encounter,” said Pratesi, rethinking at that time crucial. Something deep in his being changed forever. Upon returning to Italy, he made a symbolic gesture destined to change not only his life, but that of countless Italian animal and vegetable species: he sold the rifle and bought a camera.
Born in Rome in 1934 and raised during the war in the Viterbo countryside, Prato had always had a link with nature. As he himself admitted, after “a youthful infatuation for hunting”, that meeting with the Orsa transformed his interest in animals into a conservation mission.
The birth of WWF Italia: a vision becomes reality
After the experience in Türkiye, Pratesi learned of the birth of World Wildlife Fund in Switzerland and decided to contact them to create an Italian section. The answer was disarming in her frankness: “You will have to find the money necessary for the project”.
Despite the difficulties – he already had four children and a family to be maintained – in 1966 he brought together some “illuminated friends” in his architect study and founded the WWF Italia “with little money and so much enthusiasm”. That enthusiasm, born from the encounter with the bear in Anatolia, would never have abandoned him, remaining his distinctive feature until the end.
A legacy that transformed the country
The impact of the meeting of Prato with that bear has extended far beyond its personal transformation, concretely shaping the Italian landscape. Today our country can count on over 100 WWF oasis that protect about 27,000 hectares of territory, on the framework law of the protected areas of 1991 which has created the system of national parks, and on species such as the Sardinian deer saved from extinction.
The first concrete action of the newborn WWF Italia was the acquisition of the hunting rights of the Burano lagoon, giving life to the first oasis and creating a conservation model that would multiply throughout Italy. In 1985, thanks to an extraordinary fundraising campaign, the WWF purchased the Monte Arcosu area in Sardinia, saving the Sardinian deer on the edge of extinction.
A life between nature and art
Prato’s passion for nature always intertwined with his artistic talent.
Since I was very young I loved animals and drawing, “he said. “I spent the afternoons drawing the animals of the Rome Zoo, with the help of a painter uncle.”
His watercolors and his naturalistic notebooks have become not only testimonies of his adventures all over the world, but powerful communication tools that have helped generations of Italians to understand the importance of biodiversity.
The bear that continues to walk with us
Today after this very long journey that must make us proud of everything we have realized, I can say that nature is everything. This is what saves us from the species that does the most damage: man.
Thus Prato summarized the lesson of a life dedicated to the protection of the environment.
That bear met in the Turkish forests in 1963 unknowingly contributed to changing the face of Italy, inspiring a man to transform his life and, with it, the ecological consciousness of an entire country.
A random encounter that generated a wave of change whose effects will continue to spread far beyond the life of its protagonist.
Today, while we say goodbye to Fulco Prato, we can imagine that somewhere, in the forests of Anatolia, the descendants of that bear continue to walk, unaware of having contributed to one of the most significant cultural revolutions of contemporary Italy.
