VELLETRI, Italy _ The wine comes in a bottle labeled in elegant script on a gold background. Fuggiasco, it is called.
But this wine was not produced in an ocher Renaissance palazzo peopled by doddering aristocrats. This wine is made within the whitewashed walls of Velletri prison, a few miles south of Rome, and is put out by thieves and murderers. Fuggiasco means fugitive. A sister vintage goes by the name Seven Turns of the Key, an Italian expression for the depressing finality of imprisonment.
The products are a curious sample of inmate rehabilitation efforts in Italian prisons. Training inmates for life on the outside is, in theory, nothing new, but this is a country that three decades ago ran Devil's Island-style penal colonies and that still gets low marks for overcrowding and maltreatment in prisons. In a land where people believe in the curative powers of culture and a good diet, the rehab programs include theater groups, poetry clubs and, in the case of Velletri, the production of fruity country wines, the pressing of olives into oil and the cultivation of strawberries.
"The primary goal is to train inmates to do useful things. We also want to be part of the fabric of this country, so naturally, some things are very Italian," said Rodolfo Craia, an agronomist who shepherds the prisoners through the intricacies of winemaking.
"We are surrounded by vineyards," he said, gesturing to fields in the Castelli Romani district, known for its whites. "What better than to make wine?"
Velletri is Italy's only winemaking prison. Five years ago, Craia took a job as an agricultural trainer there. In prison records, he noticed an inmate whose previous vocation was vintner. The prisoner, Marcello Bizzoni, had run afoul of tax authorities and received a five-year sentence.
Craia enlisted Bizzoni in the wine venture and got the Italian government to provide almost half a million dollars in equipment, including presses and big stainless steel fermentation vats. Soon, Velletri was turning out 45,000 bottles a year from grapes bought locally. A marketer sells the annual output. Profits go to the government.
Craia's agricultural mini-conglomerate now includes producing honey, apples, hydroponic tomatoes and strawberries, much of it within the prison walls. Big cellblocks with barred windows are surrounded by plastic greenhouses, trees and grapevines. About one-tenth of the 350 inmates are employed, and some who are on good behavior work outside the walls. The produce is consumed within the prison.
"It's better than staying all day in a cell. I caress these strawberries and for a minute I feel I'm not really here," said a convicted killer who was replanting a strawberry plant inside an experimental greenhouse.
There is precious little information on whether this or other rehabilitation projects help former convicts go straight. Craia did not know the fate of the dozens of inmates who have passed through his program. One problem, he said, is that half the prisoners in Italy are illegal immigrants who tend to disappear or go back to their homelands after their release. There is no systematic program to track what happens to former inmates, he said.
Critics say it is window dressing. "The government puts up these programs but doesn't push them for results," said Alesandro Margara, a retired judge and former director of Italy's penal system. "Clearly, it's more productive to have prisoners out in the vineyard than to leave them in cells 20 hours a day. But that's all we know."
"We need to know what happens to these people a year after they leave prison," said Carlo Alberto Romano, a criminologist at the University of Brescia. "But no one is paying for that."
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Prison reform dating from 1975 required detention facilities to start work and recreation programs. Yet, Italian prisons receive low marks for treatment of inmates; their population stands at about 56,000, one-third more than capacity, according to Justice Ministry figures.
"We've had serious concerns about Italy and the systematic abuse that goes on in its prisons," said Nerys Lee, a researcher for Amnesty International, the human rights monitoring organization. "Pretty regularly we see reports of ill treatment by prison guards that amounts to torture."
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At San Vittore prison in Milan some inmates are organized into a poetry society. They publish their works on their Web site as well as in a magazine called Two, after the prison's address, 2 Piazza Filangeli. Getting "sent to No. 2" is slang for ending up in San Vittore, an old-style prison with closet-size cells designed for two inmates but often holding three. "Getting out of the cells is one reason to write poetry," said Francesco Ghelardini, a convicted bank robber. "It would be crazy to think that everyone is going to take us seriously. This is a way for us to pass the time."
Inmates at Volterra prison in Tuscany is home to a long-running prison theater group. "God knows there are plenty of unemployed actors outside of jail, so treating this as just vocational exercise is not enough. Also, if you just view it as therapy, you don't get theater," said Armando Punzo, the Neapolitan director of the Compagnia della Fortezza prison troupe.
Punzo regards his actors as heirs to the neorealist tradition of Italian film, in which amateur actors were used in gritty movies about Italian street life. They have put on plays by Shakespeare, Brecht and Genet and adaptations of Virgil's "The Aeneid." The 45-member troupe performs in the annual theater festival at Volterra, a fortress built by the Medici family, Renaissance-era rulers of Florence.
Santolo Matrone, who has served 11 years of a 17-year sentence for murder, is a veteran with the company. "We don't just want to be the objects of curiosity," he said in the prison's bright red rehearsal room. "This is not just a perversion meant to titillate."
Other inmates in the room nodded. One was a Moroccan who also writes poetry. Another, from Gambia, said he wanted to be able to express himself better when he gets out of prison.
"We want to forget we are here and also to get the audience to forget we are prisoners," said Gaetano La Rosa, a convicted killer from Naples. "There would be no greater pleasure than being known as actors. Of course, then we return to our cells, but for a few minutes it would be magic."
