What's up with WTI: Editorial # 160

Feb 17, 2023 1130

Dear friends, things are going good here in Italy, and we hope the same for you. Once again there’s many things happened in this February for We the Italians, and many more will be coming in the close future.

A few days ago We the Italians had the honor of being called among the speakers at an event celebrating a wonderful project involving five different Italian ministries, coordinated by our friends in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs: the Roots Tourism (Turismo delle Radici). It is a very interesting project created to help the small villages all over Italy from which so many Italians left to go find a new life all around the world, and to convince their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren to return to visit these places, to invest in these borghi, to revive them. In addition to me, there were four Ambassadors of We the Italians who gave their input by participating in some of the discussions hosted in this beautiful institutional venue: Edoardo Colombo, our Ambassador for Tourism; Delfina Licata, Ambassador for Emigration; Marina Gabrieli, our Ambassador to Puglia and national coordinator of the Roots Tourism project; and Gualtiero Carraro, who has just accepted to be our Ambassador for the metaverse. They also talked about L’anno delle radici, the Year of Roots, which will be 2024, an idea that originated from We the Italians and was launched on May 17, 2019 on the program "L'Italia con voi" on Rai Italia, hosted by our friend Monica Marangoni.

As always in this month's magazine you will also find my two interviews, and this time there is a round number to celebrate: the second in February is the 300th published on We the Italians! Honestly, when I published the first one on April 12, 2013 I never thought that I would do so many. And we are certainly not stopping here. This interview is not only important because it is number 300: I really recommend it because the topic and interviewee, John Viola, are very important and exceptional. Please read it and you will not regret listening to my advice.

Starting this February, two new collaborations begin for us, and one is relaunched. All three of these collaborations will help us promote excellent opportunities that come from Italy for all our readers who are in the United States, and they will also be featured with new columns in our magazine. We have selected three prestigious partners, two new and one that has just turned into something even better, to help you learn more about and appreciate Italian Cinema, Italian Lifestyle and Fashion, and Italian Education and Sport. The first Italian excellence of these, cinema, will be told by Movieitaly, the leader in streaming Italian movies: in their monthly column they will tell us about a film that you can see exclusively on their platform special and with very favorable conditions thanks to an exclusive discount dedicated only to you, the readers of We the Italians. The second Italian excellence we will propose is lifestyle and fashion, thanks to Sartoria Carfora, a young but already historical brand born in the home par excellence of tailoring in Italy, Naples. Here, too, we are preparing for our friends who are in the Tri State area an exceptional offer so that they can enjoy the extraordinary talent that combines tradition and innovation of master Enzo Carfora, who will accompany us in the coming months to discover the Italian fashion during the four different seasons of the year. The third Italian excellence, returning to the magazine with the strengthening of our partnership with our friends at Rome City Institute from the College Life Italia group, actually combines two sectors together: education and sports. Rome City has helped us bring some Italian American student athletes here to Rome, and we will soon be announcing some great news to give new We the Italians scholarship in this field. The kids who are here thanks to Rome City Institute and We the Italians will tell us about the successes and the beauty of this adventure, in the column we have called "An Italian American in Rome." Two wonderful new additions and a renewed friendship for the We the Italians family of partners, with special exclusive terms just for you, our beloved readers.

As mentioned before, the We the Italians family is also expanding because there is a new Ambassador, Gualtiero Carraro, who will represent us towards a virtual but very important thematic sector: the metaverse. Gualtiero is a digital entrepreneur, founder and partner of several innovative startups. He has won ten different International awards for digital works and platforms, and is the inventor of some innovative virtual reality and augmented reality solutions, including the first version of Street View in 2006 and the first VR app for Tablet, presented by Steve Jobs in 2011. Some of his significant results are the Europe's best-selling multimedia encyclopedia, the first video portals with tens of thousands of Business videos and the first virtual mapping of a nation, Italy.

During this month I was honored to be asked to tell the story of We the Italians to a couple of dear friends, who published online the results of these two interviews. The first is my friend Andrea Lyn Van Benschoten, an Italian American Jersey girl who published our chat here on her blog, in English; the second is my friend Alice Malerba from Radio MIR, a web radio dedicated to the Italians abroad, who published the video of our interview in Italian here.

Once again let me remind you that the new yearbook of We the Italians is available, with the 23 interviews (in Italian and English) published during 2022. You can find a preview and buy a copy here. Also, please use our virtual store to buy gifts and gadgets, where you can find more than 20 products in different colors: t-shirts, tank tops, hoodies, onesies, mugs, notebooks, pillows, totes, tapestries, pins, laptop and smartphone cases, magnets, stickers, masks. Buy We the Italians!

It’s all for now. Please stay safe and take care, and enjoy our magazine and our contents on our website. The future’s so bright, we gotta wear shades. A big Italian hug from Rome!

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