The Northeast as a large open factory to tell “manufacturing is culture.” That’s right “with an accent on the e.” To date 50 locations, at the time of Nov. 29 are set to double: from workshop to hub (Venice), from industry to museum to laboratory. And again: from Verona to Trieste, passing through a dozen enterprises in the Vicenza area, traveling along the axis up from the Treviso area to Pordenone, ranging to the artistic forges of Venice and Udine.
All places open to the public simultaneously for an entire afternoon in what has been dubbed “the largest opening of industrial and manufacturing culture.” A network operation woven by Filiberto Zovico with CulTVenezie, European Cultural Salon, which this year radiates to the main areas of the Venetian regions, scientific bases of the Fondazione Nordest directed by Stefano Micelli, patronage of Confindustria and Confartigianato of Veneto and Friuli Venezia Giulia, collaboration of Italian Stories, a reality that promotes tourism in artistic artisan workshops. “A choral experience,” Maurizio Castro, who has been at the helm of the Quanta Group, lead partner for the past 6 months, calls it, “that gives a response to the excess of individualism that characterized the famous Northeastern miracle, the best way to open an industrial policy debate.
LAUNCH. The launch of Open Factory yesterday in Vicenza’s Basilica Palladiana “a place par excellence where culture and manufacturing have crossed paths” and which finds its own declination in the Jewellery Museum, a project of Fiera di Vicenza with the Municipality, created to promote the culture of goldsmithing and jewelry and which will be open with guided tours during the event, as anticipated by Fiera vice-president Stefano Stenta.
PATH. Antonio Maconi, with Goodnet who oversaw the organization, walked the eight itineraries into which businesses were divided from design to mechanics, from bio high-tech to logistics, from agribusiness to business museums and industrial archaeology, from artisan workshops to business services well aware that “it is difficult to find a common denominator among businesses that are different in size,” but it is precisely by “intercepting routes that affinities emerge.” And the stories. “This is where the revival of the domestic economy and the territory comes from,” emphasizes Giordano Riello, president of Giovani Imprenditori di Confindustria Veneto. “It is often said that with culture you cannot eat, but the data confirm the opposite. Culture produces 80 billion euros a year and companies that have invested in culture saw their turnover increase in 2014 by 3 percent and exports by 4 percent.” “Manufacturing,” says Antonio Morello, deputy vice president of Confartigianato Imprese Veneto, “imposes its presence no longer just as a producer of goods but as a place to visit. This is an extraordinary combination in the region with the greatest vocation for tourism in Italy. Craftsmanship is a natural partner, not only for what it has to show, but for its history.” It echoes the phrase of Giovanni Bonotto, woolen mill in Molvena, borrowed as a slogan: “Because we are Giotto’s children, we Italians, not Bill Gates’.”
