On the occasion of the TTG Travel Experience, Italy’s leading event for the promotion of world tourism, held this year at the Rimini Fairgrounds from Wednesday, October 11 to Friday, October 13, Territori e Italianità organized an “off-show” event at Villa Torlonia, in the countryside of San Mauro Pascoli. The visit to the villa, which is considered one of the main places of Pascoli’s memory, with the convivial event and the space for presentation and reflection that completed the evening, are recounted to us by Antonio Serra in this article, which is full of references and interesting considerations.
A fine meeting organized by Territories and Italianità at Villa Torlonia
Several months ago, I had the good fortune to meet Salvatore Illiani, among the founders of La Paranza cooperative, and exchange a few words with him on the sidelines of one of his presentations.
I was curious to know what had happened in the five years from the moment Don Antonio Loffredo, parish priest of the Rione Sanità, began to put together a patrol of young people by winning them over one by one, to the moment when these same young people began to throw themselves into seemingly insane undertakings, such as cleaning up the catacombs of San Gennaro to return them to the enjoyment of citizens and tourists, and in all the other projects that have helped change the face of the Sanità district and give it an image in the world hitherto unthinkable.
He thanked me for a question that, he said, he had been waiting for a long time. “Nothing,” he replied. “We didn’t do anything in particular, except follow Don Antonio, who was educating us about beauty in those years. We listened and saw a lot, visited exhibitions. We even went abroad to see them. At a certain point, that desire for beauty exploded in us and we realized that we were surrounded by it without knowing it. It was just a matter of drawing it out.”
The guided tour of Villa Torlonia
I was reminded of this episode on Friday evening, during the TTG Expo off-show, organized by Territori e Italianità in San Mauro Pascoli, at Villa Torlonia.
The evening began with a guided tour of the villa and the exhibition it currently houses. Villa Torlonia, a historic place of residence but above all of work, has undergone remarkable interventions over the years, which have revived it by transforming its large spaces, particularly those originally occupied by the cellars, which now host exhibitions and events. How remarkable was this renovation work, which would not have been possible without the stubbornness of the local government, can be seen by comparing it with period photos.
How strong the impact is still on people, starting with those who work inside the facility, can be understood from the words, but also from the looks. The work of dramatizing a famous poem by Pascoli, done through an immersive multimedia installation, is narrated by the guide with the passion and pride of someone who is basically telling us, “This thing is mine too, this thing is us.”
We are in Romagna
Are we really children of the territory that saw us born or have we chosen by elective affinity with the people we met there. I said to myself that an initiative like Territori e Italianità could only be born in Romagna, a place capable of uniting concreteness, will to do, but also audacity and desire to fly high. Here the rural houses, with their baked bricks, have the same color as the earth, from which they seem to have been extracted by an act of will or willfulness.
I thought, we are in the land of Tonino Guerra and Fellini, of filthy “amarcords” that become poetry and transfigure into the dimension of dreams, ballrooms and waltzes, pop declination of what was heard from the residences of the noble Austrian holidaymakers of the 18th and 19th centuries.
Here they dug in the dirt singing Romagna mia, animated by a momentum and generosity that it would be simplistic to call disinterested, but I would say, rather, interested in something else.
A pause for reflection on the sidelines of the TTG Travel Experience
“Doing to think,” Andrea Succi teaches, and to me it reminds me of Karen Blixen who wrote, almost a century ago, “The center of man is in what he does.”
There were many of us in the small room that welcomed us, how many exactly I could not say. I entered among the last ones and realized that as I sat down and moved my chair to whatever position, I would still have to have someone’s back. So many people with different professional and human stories, but with something in common that I was not slow to understand. I was struck by the richness of insights that can translate into things to do together, with people who I can say I do not know, but who I can equally “re-know” within a professional and human experience that somehow brings me closer to them.
It is difficult to separate professional and human paths in people who, by choice or a late vocation, interpret their work according to criteria that are not the common ones, with a passion and involvement that are recognized for their intensity.
The world we live in claims to define for us the perimeter of our desires and passions, what is work and what is leisure, necessarily different for each age group. However, we realize (I mean: some realize) that real life begins when we are able to move beyond categories and patterns. Because our desires, like our hearts, are infinite.
Thanks to Andrea Succi and all the others
We moved, almost without our realizing it, from convivial and festive time to that of presentations and discussions, with the careful conducting of Andrea Succi, to whom I must acknowledge the great work done upstream, which, as I know from experience, is like that of the conductor of an orchestra: it is not seen on these occasions, but it is what makes them possible.
“The conductor,” Ezio Bosso, whom I had the great pleasure of meeting in his last days, once said, “by bringing different people together and trying to enhance their diversity, he performs a little magic every time. Not surprisingly, he stands in front of the orchestra with a baton in his hand.”
Thank you Andrea, Françoise, Maurizio, Chiara, Silvia and thank you to everyone I met on this wonderful evening.
Antonio Serra
Digital Strategy Director
at Espereal Technologies
