The person behind the science.And the science behind the person.
The person behind the science.
And the science behind the person.
Some things are difficult to explain in a bio.
Not because they're complicated - but because they began before there were words for them.
Before there were courses, certifications, or institutions. Before there was a school, or an academy, or a methodology with a name.
They began with a child in rural Sardinia who preferred the company of stray cats and dogs to the company of other children. Who had, as she would later describe it, her antennas permanently raised toward every form of animal call.
That child is the reason Fauno Academy exists.
Where this began
Alessia Podda grew up in the Sardinian hinterland, in a culture where the relationship between people, plants, and animals was not philosophy - it was daily life.
Plant-based remedies were not alternative medicine. They were simply medicine. Every family had its preparations, its knowledge, its seasonal rituals of care.
This early immersion in what she would later call the medicine of the Earth shaped a way of seeing that no formal education would ever entirely replace - and that every formal education she pursued would eventually confirm.
The question that changed everything
Alessia began her university studies in medicine. She came close to graduating - and then stopped.
Not from doubt. From clarity.
The closer she came to the end ofher medical training, the more clearly she saw what the model she was being taught could not accommodate: the patient whose symptoms had no definitive organic cause.
The animal whose test results were normal but whose vitality was visibly diminished. The gap between the absence of disease and the presence of health.
Alessia, in her own words:
«I found myself increasingly convinced that I was dealing with a model that was certainly valid - but incomplete. Where attention to the symptom and the search for the right drug erased every possibility of accessing that deeper healing toward which every living being naturally moves.»She left medicine and turned toward naturopathy - first for humans, which she practised for years as a consultant, then toward the application of holistic disciplines to animals, for which she trained extensively abroad.
What she found was not a contradiction between the two worlds. She found the biological explanation for what she had always observed.
Building what didn't exist
In 2016, Alessia founded Istituto Fauno in Italy - the country's first professional school of veterinary naturopathy.
It was not founded because there was a market for it. It was founded because there was a need for it - a gap between what conventional veterinary medicine could offer and what animals' bodies were actually asking for.
The school grew into something she had not entirely anticipated: not just a training institution, but a community. A place where professionals and passionate guardians found, often for the first time, a rigorous framework for something they had long sensed but could not name.
10
years
HUNDREDS
of practitioners trained
Italy's FIRST
veterinary naturopathy school
Why Fauno Academy
After a decade of building theItalian professional landscape of veterinary naturopathy, Alessia recognised that the methodology she had developed - and the conviction behind it - should not stay within one country's borders.
Fauno Academy is the international expression of that conviction. Not a translation of Istituto Fauno, but an evolution of it.
A platform designed for a global audience of professionals and conscious guardians who are ready for a different conversation about animal health.
Alessia, in her own words:
«This knowledge shouldn’t stay on one island, or in one country. The conversation about animal health deserves to be broader, more rigorous and more human than it currently is. This is our contribution to that conversation.»Beyond the credentials
Alessia still lives in the Sardinian countryside - close to the sea, with a large garden, animals, a vegetable garden, and a kitchen where she bakes bread and tends fermented preparations with the same attention she brings to everything else.
She is also a biology student - because curiosity, for her, has never been a phase. It is a method.
She brings to every lecture, every course, and every piece of content she creates the same quality that her students have described again and again: the ability to make complex things legible without making them small. To hold scientific rigour and human warmth in the same hand, without choosing one at the expense of the other.
This is the person behind Fauno Academy.
