All over Italy, there are thousands of picturesque, perfect towns, with Medieval stone walls and Etruscan caves banked into hilltops from which the 360-degree vistas are interrupted only by the appearance of the next picturesque, perfect town. And all over Italy, these towns are dying.

According to a 2016 census, there are nearly 2,500 rural Italian villages that have become depopulated and abandoned—due to some combination of urbanization, poverty, and the young leaving and never returning—to the point of becoming effectively ghost towns. Two centuries-plus of architecture and craft and tradition, gone. Not Solomeo. This week, nearly 500 journalists from all over the world arrived to the hamlet on a hill between Florence and Rome to see what Brunello Cucinelli, the Umbria native and designer-cum-enlightened philosopher-king, has been working towards for the past 25 years.