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  1. Future Economies in Italy’s Piedmont: Notes from the Field Monday, October 26, 2009

    Josh McManus is one of CreateHere’s co-founders and Creative Strategists. He’s on the road for a month-long trip abroad through the Marshall Memorial Fellowship, and sent us this dispatch from Italy.

    The pace of my trip has sped up significantly, to point where it’s become difficult for me to write regularly. That’s probably best, though: Italy, our most recent stop, takes time to digest, literally and figuratively.

    We flew from Paris to Turin via the French/Italian Alps, welcomed by the violent shudders of “Siberian Winds” some 24,000 feet above sea level. The plane’s shaking was unlike anything I’d experienced before, and the panicked look on the flight attendant’s face must have mirrored my own. A silver lining, however: this was to be the first and only terror of my visit to Italy.

    We were welcomed at the home café of Italy’s largest coffee company, Lavazza. The raciness of their advertisement campaigns was in sharp contrast to the humility and easy candor of our host, Piero Gastaldo of the Compagnia di San Paolo.

    The Compagnia—company—has billions in assets and stands as one of Europe’s top three private philanthropic foundations. It began as a brotherhood of social service in 1563, and following the recent global economic crisis, is now one of the world’s 10 largest banks

    Over nearly five centuries of growth, the Compagnia’s philanthropic arm spun out and now focuses on a mission of bettering Turin specifically, as well as the larger world, by connecting the local dimension to the global sphere.

    During this trip, I’ve had the opportunity to witness an exciting fact: many great cities that excel at improvement derive that capacity not through transitional governments but through the long-range vision of benevolent philanthropic entities.

    If Paris was a “Moveable Feast”, then Turin was a fixed celebration of place and presence.  From touchdown to wheels up, our visit showed how a post-agrarian (and perhaps re-agrarian) economy has transformed itself into the epi-center of a movement.  

    On my first morning in the city, I strolled out for a 7:00 am market visit. It was Tuesday, and conventional wisdom has taught me not to have high hopes for early mid-week mornings, but insomnia drove me to restless exploration. I was blown away to find Europe’s largest outdoor market, boasting more than 1,000 stalls of fresh food, meats, cheeses, fish, clothing and sundries of all types. People of all stations piled into the market to shop, but also engage in the rich cultural tradition that is a town market: the market is far more than just a place to get supplies. It’s a place where news is passed from booth to booth, where culinary traditions are preserved, and where immigrants and natives alike gather around the shared concerns of sustenance and survival.

    It is evidence of a good practice: the market is the flagship for a region that is conscious of where it came from and where it’s going.

    Our travels and studies took us to the production facilities of the aforementioned Lavazza coffee company, where the discussions focused more on grower conditions than profit margins; the emphasis on carbon reduction rather than global economic crisis. Lavazza does well by doing good, and that was clear throughout their presentation.

    From Lavazza, we drove deep into the Piedmont Plateau to tour the University of Gastroendemonic Sciences, where undergraduate and masters students were building the skills of palate definition, taste recognition scales, and agro-business. Their goal is to become front-line leaders of the quickly globalizing food renaissance. From preserving all of the wines of Italy to developing standardized palate recognition scales for the world, the Institute is the brainchild of Slow Food founder Carlo Petrini.  The shining eyes among the student body was enough to prove to me that magic is happening in that valley.

    There’s no way to capture that entire valley in one dispatch, but I can say that I had two of the best meals of my life in the course of twelve hours there; drank beer that is inspiring a revolution in the Italian wine country; stood on top of a hill and soaked up the cool breeze that turns out some of the world’s best grapes; talked Slow Food strategy in the office of Carlo Petrini; and changed my outlook on the world. It’s a big valley, y’all.

    I realized: we are faced with morally imperative issues on a frequent basis. From genocide in the developing world, to our footprint on the earth, our shared values tell us that things are wrong, but that we cannot work alone. Transformation can only come when moral imperative meets fiscal imperative, and that’s what I witnessed in Italy’s Piedmont. Slow in no longer an isolated idea: it’s a robust and growing economy that is poised to change the way we think about sustenance and agrarian economies.

    As a firm believer in the free market, this brings a smile to my face. It also restores my confidence that markets follow the consumer and not the other way around. There’s hope, then, for leaving this world better than we found it.

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