Vacchi: “We are not different territories, we are one big territory that has a shared virtuous characteristic to be enhanced”
A packed day of conferences and meetings closed yesterday, Friday, Sept. 14, with Stefano Massini ‘s evening event dedicated to 10 years since the fall of Lehman Brothers. Piacenza responded more than positively to the experimental proposal to use the Città Impresa Festival as a laboratory for discussion on the future of an area that acts as a natural bridge between Milan and Emilia, the two vertices that, with Veneto, make up the new Italian industrial triangle. Preceded by a week of open discussion among the different subjects on the pages of the local newspaper La Libertà, the debate started precisely from the City’s role as a “bridge between the Northwest and Northeast” within the new industrial triangle that has sustained the Italian recovery. Both the city’s mayor, Patrizia Barbieri, and the president of Confindustria, Alberto Rota, urged by Giangiacomo Schiavi, stressed that Piacenza “can play the game” provided it knows how to build a team game on some strategic objectives.
For his part, Aldo Bonomi, one of the leading experts on “flows and places,” explained well that the logic of globalization does not grant opportunities to those who are unable to “stay in the middle” by putting culture and territory, manufacturing and trade, agriculture and tourism into a system. Instead, the first afternoon was dedicated to businesses: from “champions” such as Musetti, Motridal and Univel, told by their respective entrepreneurs and Filiberto Zovico, head of ItalyPost’s Centro Studi, to the debate between Confindustria Emilia Area Centro, Assolombarda and their Veneto counterparts. In fact, Alberto Vacchi, Carlo Bonomi and Alberto Baban discussed at length with Dario Di Vico on the unknowns about the recovery and what is happening in the new industrial triangle that has driven Italian growth in the last two years. In this regard, Alberto Vacchi, pointed out that the negative signals on the economic situation that have emerged from the ISTAT data of recent days, fortunately seem not to touch the area that Aldo Bonomi calls LOVER (Lombardy, Venezie, Emilia Romagna). It was precisely on the global outlook, ten years after the fall of Lehman, that Ferruccio de Bortoli and Marco Mazzucchelli confronted each other in a packed Piazza Cavalli, who said he was certain that, contrary to what is often said, the possible next crisis will not see China as its epicenter. De Bortoli wanted to emphasize at the conclusion of the discussion the even anthropological causes of the fall of the bank that is the symbol of capitalism: “greed and covetousness are factors behind situations in which many fall into the trap of the illusion of easy gains.” The evening was then marked by the reflections of Stefano Massini. The fall of Lehman,” said the playwright-writer of Something About Lehman and author of Lehman’s Trilogy, currently being staged at the National Theatre in London-was for the economy the equivalent of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Great satisfaction with the success of this special edition of the Festival Città Impresa was expressed by both the mayor of Piacenza, Patrizia Barbieri, the president of Confindustria, Alberto Rota, and the founder of Italy Post, Filiberto Zovico, who closed the event by making an appointment for the fall edition to be held in Bergamo from Friday, October 26 to Sunday, October 28, 2018.
