The Vicenza Newspaper.
Ten years chronicling the “metropolis Northeast,” recording year after year the trends of an area fundamental to the country’s growth, analyzing its characteristics, its transformations, its joys and sorrows, its successes but also its limitations, in one of the most troubled historical periods of the last fifty years.
The Festival Città Impresa, which was born in 2008 and actually started in Schio and the intuition of then-Schio mayor Luigi Dalla Via and Gigi Copiello, reaches its 10th edition and returns to Vicenza for the third time, from March 31 to April 2, with an edition particularly centered on the relationship between economy politics and territory and with a rich program of events that will take place in the city’s most evocative venues, from the Teatro Olimpico to the Church of San Bartolomeo to Palazzo Chiericati, from the Palladio Museum to Palazzo Trissino and the Gallerie d’Italia – Palazzo Leone Montanari.The Festival, promoted by the publishing platform VeneziePost and the City of Vicenza, has the collaboration of the Corriere della Sera Foundation, the participation of Confindustria Vicenza and Confartigianato Vicenza, the main partnership of Intesa Sanpaolo and Cassa di Risparmio del Veneto, and the partnership of Adacta and Synergie. CATCHING THE TRANSFORMATIONS. “The new is born in the periphery” is a concept of Enzo Rullani, who chaired the scientific committee of the event in the early years, to emphasize the privileged point of observation that Città Impresa wanted to cover. And in fact, the Festival has always had a privileged eye for the “new” that was emerging, even when this “new” included the decline of a model-non-model such as that of the Northeast, and the emergence of a metropolitan Po Valley context of which the Venices are now an integral part. “Città Impresa, in its ten years of life, has cultivated the ambitions of this territory-the pocket-sized multinationals, the idea of a European capital of culture-and measured the failures, such as that of its popular banks,” notes Filiberto Zovico, founder of VeneziePost and creator of the Città Impresa Festival. We have always tried to project our gaze beyond the contingent to grasp the sense of the transformations that, accomplice to the crisis, have profoundly changed the connotations of the Northeast, with the birth of new “champion” companies capable of grinding out profits with innovative business models and with the crisis of those that have not been able or have been able to make the qualitative leap required by the times.”Over the years, the Festival has become the laboratory of that Turin-Milan-Venice axis (plural in the sense of Triveneto) that today is interpreted as the territorial platform of the country’s great innovative manufacturing heritage. It is no coincidence that the event has recently shifted to the Vicenza-Bergamo axis, two symbolic capitals of Italian manufacturing. And in fact the Vicenza edition these days will be followed by the “fall” edition, from October 27 to 29, in the city of Kilometro Rosso.
“SPIRIT OF ENTERPRISE.” The program of the tenth edition of the Festival reflects the characteristics of this new phase, interweaving the great economic and political debate with issues related to the development of the territory. “When we started ten years ago, we were clear that the Northeast was at a turning point, and from then to now we have tried to reflect on the course that could lead to a new phase of growth,” says Zovico. “Today we are here to field new ideas that will enable businesses and territories to emerge from this difficult phase and build inclusive models of development.”This is a preferential channel to encourage a conscious cultural growth of the new generations and develop their skills to integrate into increasingly dynamic societies,” notes Carlo Moretti, deputy general manager of Cassa di Risparmio del Veneto. “The presence of the Intesa Sanpaolo Group at the Festival wants to reaffirm its support for quality initiatives for the dissemination of knowledge and the development of the country. “Cities and businesses are two concepts that are central to Veneto’s identity,” concludes Jacopo Bulgarini d’Elci, deputy mayor of Vicenza and alderman for growth. “Cities and businesses dot the landscape of our region: not only the physical landscape, but also the value landscape. Vicenza has always seen creativity, productivity, innovation, inventiveness and the pursuit of beauty go hand in hand. It is therefore a destiny that leads us to host the Enterprise City Festival among these squares, in these palaces and theaters, in the halls and under the vaults that still testify to how the spirit of enterprise can inhabit cities and change their shape.” Vicenza, therefore, returns again this year for three days at the center of the country’s economic, political and social debate.