While her friends sleep off hangovers, 23-year-old Vanessa Peduzzi is doing a dawn check on her livestock, one of a growing number of Italian youths ditching the fast lane for a farmer's life. "It's a tiring, demanding job, but I like it," she told AFP as she walked through the wood-lined pastures high above Lake Como in northern Italy to show off the building she is slowly restoring and transforming into a farmhouse.

"I chose this life. This is where I want to be, surrounded by nature and animals," she said. Peduzzi is a trained chef, but has downed her ladles to become a donkey and cow breeder instead in Alpe Bedolo, some 813 metres (2,600 feet) above sea level, near the border with Switzerland. "I started last year with two little donkeys. I didn't have any land or a stable, so I had a friend lend me a meadow," she said.