Freedom / by Patrizia Soffientini
The audience at the Teatini, made up of dignitaries, students and entrepreneurs, murmurs sympathetically when sociologist Aldo Bonomi, director of the Aster Consortium, launches the formula for Piacenza to “hold the cup and Amazon together.”
Beautiful suggestion. The more traditional pleasure arm in arm with the contemporary flow of goods for which we are the coveted crossroads.
Other than sad city. Piacenza wedged in the most productive and richest triangle in Italy, the one already hooked to butter Europe, and which someone has romantically renamed Lover, Lombardy, Veneto, Emilia Romagna; Piacenza with a privileged quality of life, a high employment rate, an industrious intermediate capitalism, in a position that everyone envies us and which we must learn to make count. What more do we want? We want more. The answer is in that exhortation with which journalist and host Giangiacomo Schiavi closes the first Piacenza Città Impresa festival discussion, “It’s the morning of courage.” To come out, however, from a certain limbo, from a certain masochism, from a certain neglect, from a certain individualism. And really one has the feeling of being at a motivational session, even a bit psychoanalytic, where out loud we repeat things we know deep down. Saying them with more energy and all together is the first step in group therapy. Having discarded the idea of becoming the “dormitory” of Milan’s tertiary sector (Bonomi and Schiavi) after being its subcontractor in the Fordist years, avoiding playing it down, a profile emerges of which to be proud, the strength of excellent manufacturing and logistics that is raising the bar on quality and skills (Alberto Rota, president of Confindustria Piacenza). Meanwhile, Mayor Patrizia Barbieri lists all the good there is, we the highway hub, we the Ligurian hinterland, we the interweaving of small companies able to withstand the crisis, we the home of first-rate universities: “Let’s not weep over ourselves, let’s not screw ourselves, we have so many threads and all must move together, no one stays at the borders.” “Yes, we have a big problem of mentality,” Rota echoes her, “which days like these try to move. Take Parma, where self-confidence is in the streets. We may not have the strength of the region to attract names like Lamborghini and Philip Morris, but what the heck, we have a formidable fabric of small businesses, excellent training centers, the better to have a more robust connection with Milan. The Achilles’ heel? It’s called “infrastructure.” The mayor, however, announces that the choices on the new hospital are near and a good hospital is in itself a source of urban quality, and a meeting with Rfi on the Polo del Ferro, to remove freight traffic from the passenger station, is on the agenda very soon. Beware, however, let’s be on guard against anomie, warns Bonomi, against the absence of rules: “your territory is hyper-attracted by modernity coming forward, get a move on, try to understand how it relates.” Other good advice emerges in the basket of discussion, for example cultivating relationships as a mid-Paduan gateway (“gateway but not usher, nor satellite”). And what about our being suspended between manufacturing and logistics, the former penalized relative to the latter, Schiavi asks? Rota does not pit the two spheres against each other-when manufacturing failed to provide answers, the doors were opened to logistics-but examples such as the Castelsangiovanni “manned, fenced, governed” hub are a compelling model. For more manufacturing to come is not a matter of the cost of areas, but of a rewarding context: “made of connections, quality of life.”
Goodbye Cinderella that only looks to Lombardy, the province-will say the mayor-has allied with Parma and Reggio to make the capital of culture and tourism together: “don’t shut ourselves inside a wall, we are not a fiefdom but a crossroads.” Nice challenge for young people. Few are those 2,400 who will enroll in high school, though, warns Rota: “we risk not keeping our roots and skills.” And so many bets are on the line: cultivating the environment, and here Schiavi returns to the desire to have a better cared for “wonderful treasure chest” Cavalli Square; uniting shattered forces, and here Rota announces a platform to give unified representation to the nine food consortia. There are the former barracks awaiting destiny and the desire to relieve the taxation of businesses in the mountains. The plural province really has many threads to move.