Yesterday I was absorbed in listening to Antonín Dvořák’s Cello Concerto in B minor, Op. 104. It was the 1970 studio version, with Jacqueline du Pré as soloist and her husband, Daniel Barenboim, conducting the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

There is also a famous live version from 1968, performed as a sign of solidarity with the people of Czechoslovakia a few days after the Soviet invasion. It is perhaps the most passionate, intense, and profoundly expressive interpretation by du Pré. She was only 23 at the time but at the height of her powers: a warm and powerful sound, extraordinarily singable phrasing, unique colors and nuances. The cellist manages to bring out all the Bohemian nostalgia of the concerto, alternating moments of joy, melancholy, and triumph. Many consider it among her most inspired performances. The recording of this concert was thought to be lost; however, it was rediscovered and made available only years later. You can watch it here.

Jacqueline du Pré’s career was abruptly interrupted a few years later, in the early 1970s, by multiple sclerosis, a disease that led to her premature death in 1987.

As I listened to the melancholic passage of the concerto, thinking of the composer Dvořák, I remembered the terrible story that the so-called “family in the woods” is going through.

Dvořák: When the Bohemian woods enter the score

Antonín Dvořák was born in 1841 in Nelahozeves, a small village on the Vltava River near Prague. His father was a butcher and innkeeper, and young Antonín grew up in close contact with the common people, absorbing from an early age the melodies, songs, and dances of Bohemian and Moravian tradition. This was not mere folklore: it was the very DNA of a man — and a musician.

With success came the opportunity to realize his truest dream. In 1884 he purchased and transformed an old farmhouse in Vysoká u Příbramě, a village nestled among woods and fields about 50 km from Prague. There he tended the garden with almost religious devotion, raised pigeons, took long walks in the woods at dawn, and listened to the birdsong. It wasn’t a romantic escape from the city; it was his true calling, the place where he felt most at home.

And it is precisely from that environment that Symphony No. 8 in G major, Op. 88 (1889), was born, composed quickly between August and October directly in Vysoká. Considered his most “Bohemian” and pastoral symphony, it is a sonic portrait of life in contact with nature: the flute in the first movement clearly evokes the song of birds; the Adagio has the quiet melancholy of a summer sunset; the third movement breathes the air of open-air folk dances; the finale has the festive energy of a village fair. Composer Rafael Kubelík recalled that in Bohemia, trumpets always call to dance, never to battle; and that is exactly what we hear in the Eighth.

Nature wasn’t a conscious theme chosen by Dvořák. It was simply his world. And Symphony No. 8 is the most direct and spontaneous portrait of it.

Even more revealing is what happened when Dvořák was away from his homeland. During his sojourn in America (1892–1895), even while immersed in success and fame, he suffered intensely from homesickness for Bohemia. He sought refuge in Spillville, Iowa — a small village of Czech immigrants — because it reminded him of rural life back home. It was there that he composed the American Quartet, inspired also by the open spaces of the prairies and the song of a local bird. And it was there that, amidst nostalgia and wonder for the new world, the celebrated Symphony No. 9, “From the New World,” was born, whose moving Largo is a sigh of regret for the woods and fields left behind in Bohemia.

What would have remained of his music if Dvořák had been prevented from living in the forest, from taking walks at dawn, from cooling off in the lake near Vysoká?

Gaudí: The Sagrada Família as a Stone Forest

The same question could be asked of Antoni Gaudí. Born in Reus in 1852, the son of a coppersmith, he spent his childhood between the Camp de Tarragona and the Baix Camp, in an environment marked by nature and a strong artisan tradition. As a boy he was in poor health and struggled to keep up with his peers in games. His parents — aware that outdoor life could benefit him — allowed him to be free to be outside and observe.

And he observed. With almost scientific patience and attention, he studied the forms of nature: the spiral of shells, the curve of roots, the changing light on the water, the branching structure of trees. He frequented the beach at Tarragona, observing the changing light from winter dawn to summer sunset. He said it was impossible to describe certain landscapes to someone who hadn’t seen them: “How can you explain the broom, a branchless plant with green stems and yellow flowers, whose scent wafts for miles?”

This immersion in nature didn’t remain a childhood memory; it became the constructive principle of all his architecture. In his works — from Casa Vicens to Park Güell, from Palau Güell to Casa Batlló and Casa Milà — the interiors resemble gardens, the walls continue what grows in the ground, the windows become frames for water and light. As Chiara Curti writes in her latest book Gaudí vivo : “The house doesn’t superimpose itself on nature. It continues it.”

But it is in the Sagrada Família that this vision reaches its pinnacle. Inside the basilica, the vault is not supported by traditional columns: they are trees — pillars branching upward like the trunks of a forest, diffusing light through stained-glass windows like the sun filtering through foliage. The architecture is a stone forest, a sacred place born from the concrete experience of a sickly child left free to gaze at the trees, the sea, and the broom bushes.

Without that freedom — that life in direct contact with nature — we wouldn’t have had Gaudí. Or at least, not this Gaudí.

The Family in the Woods: When the State Decides How One Should Live

Fast forward to the present day, and the story takes a different turn. In Palmoli, a small town in Abruzzo, Italy, a family has chosen an unconventional lifestyle. Catherine is an equestrian trainer, and Nathan a cabinetmaker. They have lived all over the world and speak five languages. They have decided to raise their three children in contact with nature, far from the rhythms of consumerist society.

Their life, as described by Vanity Fair, is simple and concrete: no electricity from the grid (only solar panels), no gas (two fireplaces and a stove), no running water (the well is good and abundant). The children learn through homeschooling, with an unschooling approach — a legal method in Italy, with annual school assessments conducted by state or private schools on behalf of the Ministry. They grow a vegetable garden, play in the woods, and swim with friends in the river in summer. “I want my children to be free to learn without pressure, to become better adults, to grow up happy,” Catherine declared.

The Juvenile Court of L’Aquila, however, ruled differently. The three children were removed from their family and placed in a foster home. Not because of violence, abuse, or neglect. But because the family’s lifestyle did not meet the prevailing standards of “adequate socialization” and “suitable housing conditions.”

Professor Tonino Cantelmi, a psychiatrist and psychotherapist among the leading Italian experts involved in the case, expressed a very clear position: “Family separation is most likely the worst situation for minors.” The parents, he states, are “good,” affectionate, and present. Separation risks causing the most serious harm.”

As reported by RAI News, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni also intervened with very harsh words: “Children do not belong to the State: children belong to their mothers and fathers. A State that claims to replace them has forgotten its limits.”

The judges’ position, quoted by Avvenire, is of the opposite nature: “Here are constitutional rights at stake that minors have regardless of their parents: the right to health and the right to social life.”

But how do we measure the “right to a social life” of those who grow up among trees, neighbors, shared vegetable gardens, and rivers to bathe in? The risk, as Il Timone aptly observes, is that concepts like “adequate socialization” and “correct emotional development,” if not anchored in a real and current prejudice against the child, become instruments of cultural control. The state would no longer limit itself to protecting but to evaluating and directing families according to standardized models of “adequate” living.

For Gaudí, who due to health problems couldn’t play with his peers and was often left alone to observe nature and animal life, could we perhaps conclude that he lacked a real social life and remained socially handicapped throughout his life? Nothing could be more wrong.

To confirm this, just read Chiara Curti’s latest book, Gaudí vivo: It reveals the extraordinary social life he was able to create, especially around the construction site of the Sagrada Família — not an abstract relationship, like those some psychologists talk about, but a communal relationship that generated a true community of life among artisans, workers, builders, and their families.

Conclusion: The Forest that Creates Geniuses & the State that Distances Them from the Trees

There is a thin — and terrible — line that unites the stories in this article.

Dvořák composed his most inspired music when he was walking at dawn in the Vysoká woods, when he heard birdsong filtering through the window, when the scent of wet earth wafted into the study where he was writing the Eighth Symphony. When he was “torn” from those places — across the ocean — his nostalgia for his Bohemian woods became the Largo of the Ninth, one of the most moving moments in the entire history of music.

Gaudí became Gaudí because as a sick child he was given the freedom to be outside, to gaze at the trees, the light, the plants. That freedom transformed into the stone forest of the Sagrada Família, a sublime work that will defy the centuries.

Today, in Palmoli, three children who were growing up in a similar environment — free, loved, in touch with nature, with a well instead of a faucet and a fireplace instead of a radiator — were torn from their parents and placed in a foster home. Catherine called this separation “a very strong act of violence.” And she’s right.

According to news reports, the violence of the ban adds another bitterness: children, raised without television, have gone from listening to the birds’ chirping to passive viewers of television content. This isn’t just a touch of color: it’s a brutal summary of what we, as a society, are risking doing to the children we wanted to “protect.”

The state has a duty to intervene when children are in real danger. But the danger here wasn’t nature. It wasn’t the trees, the water from the well, the fire in the fireplace, the warmth of the songs and stories told by parents before their children fell asleep. The danger — if we want to call it that — was diversity. And diversity, from Dvořák to Gaudí, has always been the mother of everything worth preserving.

Let’s hope it’s not too late to repair the damage — psychological, emotional, irreversible — that this separation risks leaving in the souls of those three children.