It was a sold-out three-day event at the 11th edition of the Enterprise City Festival. At the center of the event was the recovery: if there are early signs of a slowdown, as Bankitalia’s estimates speculate, it emerges from Vicenza that this is not the case.
Big businessmen such as the presidents of Brembo, Alberto Bombassei, and Danieli, Gianpietro Benedetti, as well as small champion entrepreneurs or top managers such as Eataly’s Andrea Guerra, expressed confidence about the country’s recovery trend and the strength of industry and manufacturing. “The trade surplus of Italian manufacturing is set to reach a record 90 billion euros this year. Many companies have adopted winning strategies based on quality, product innovation and process digitization,” explained Gregorio De Felice, chief economist at Intesa Sanpaolo. Even an observer of traffic flows such as Aspi and Atlantia’s CEO Giovanni Castellucci, who is engaged in a complicated operation to take over Spain’s Abertis, showed confidence, opening up to the possibility of a fourth lane on some stretches of the A4, along that industrial corridor that runs from Milan to Padua and is the country’s engine of development. “In the section under our responsibility, the Milan-Brescia, we have already made investments. As for the Brescia-Padua we will make the checks and if necessary we will make investments for the fourth lane. Resources are there.” There were more than 30 events that saw thousands of people including students, entrepreneurs, professionals, professors and trade unionists discuss the issues facing Italy at a time of economic recovery and the knots that need to be overcome to make the country more competitive internationally, with great public exploits for the meetings at the Olympic Theater, such as the one on ‘Social networks and the old TV’ with the director of Tg La7
Enrico Mentana o on ‘Populism in Power’ with sociologist Ilvo Diamanti e Karoline Rörig, a scholar of history and head of the Office for German-Italian Dialogue in Bonn. There was great interest in ‘Commitment,’ the program of “true cultural renewal” that Federmeccanica previewed at the opening day of the Enterprise City Festival. “In June 2017,” stressed President Alberto Dal Poz, “when I was called to lead Federmeccanica, I made a specific commitment: to give a voice to all metal-mechanical companies. The Commitment we presented represents the vision we intend to pursue both within ourselves and within the federal system, as well as with the trade unions and the various institutional and economic players with whom Federmeccanica deals.” Space, then, was given to the themes of labor, with the president of Istat, Giorgio Alleva, of Industry 4.0, training, gender equality and those non-manufacturing sectors of the economy that also represent excellences of Made in Italy, such as tourism and culture, with leading interventions such as that of the president of the Venice Biennale, Paolo Baratta. The Festival was also an opportunity for comparisons between local administrators, such as the mayors of Piacenza, Bergamo and Vicenza, Patrizia Barbieri, Giorgio Gori and Achille Variati, and to take stock of the political situation after the March 4 vote, in a meeting with Corriere della Sera editor Luciano Fontana, M5S deputy Emilio Carelli and the former president of Lombardy, Roberto Maroni. In the afternoon of the final day, space was given to culture, first with a meeting among writers to reason about the Northeast and then with playwright Stefano Massini, who brought to the stage of the Teatro Olimpico his reading “Predicting the Economy, Interpreting Dreams. From Lehman to Freud.”
