Decision to remove children comes after parents and three daughters ate poisonous mushrooms and ended up in hospital
The decision by an Italian court to take three children being brought up in the woods away from their British-Australian parents has sparked a fierce debate in the country over alternative lifestyles.
Nathan Trevallion, a former chef from Bristol, and his wife, Catherine Birmingham, a former horse-riding teacher from Melbourne, bought a dilapidated property in a wooded area in Palmoli, in the central Italian region of Abruzzo, in 2021.
The aim was to raise their three children – Utopia Rose, 8, and six-year-old twins Galorian and Bluebell – as close to nature as possible.
They grew their own food, generated electricity via solar power and extracted their water from a well. Meanwhile, the children, surrounded by horses, donkeys and chickens, were homeschooled. Once-a-week trips to San Salvo, a town on the Adriatic coast with a population of 20,000, exposed them to the outside world.
