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I am releasing a lecture on the Italian Renaissance which I delivered last March at the College of New Jersey. Instead of a systematic approach to the 15th and 16th centuries, I decided to play a little game: I forced myself to select 10 artifacts that best sum up this age of crisis and rebirth, warfare and artistic creativity. I hope you will enjo...

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In this presentation, you will discover the different layers and cultural influences behind Marsala, Nero d’Avola, the Amaro tradition, and contemporary Sicilian winemaking. These entrepreneurial stories make manifest not just the incredible diversity and richness of the Sicilian milieu, but also the remarkable path to its contemporary reinvention....

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Dear Friends of Italian Innovators, this month I take you to Sacile, in the Northeastern region of Friuli Venezia Giulia, where in 1980 a Roman pianist and engineer, Paolo Fazioli, started his own company to pursue his dream of achieving perfect sound. Fazioli is now the world’s most sought-after brand of concert pianos. The astounding quality of F...

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Dear Friends of Italian Innovators, in February I had the honor of delivering a lecture on storytelling and entrepreneurship at Chapman University. In this presentation, I explored the archetypes of storytelling and examined the Italian tradition of narrative advertising as a distinct mark of Italian companies.  I publish it here as my core content...

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Dear Friends of Italian Innovators, my core content for February is an episode on the king of Italian fashion, Giorgio Armani—a remarkable story of Italian innovation and entrepreneurship, which developed from an early career in medicine to the creation of one of the world’s most renowned fashion brands. Among the topics: Giorgio's youth in Piacenz...

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The Italian cultural mindset as an archetype of design thinking. Here is a presentation I gave a few months ago at The College of New Jersey in which I investigate Italy’s art and entrepreneurship as a model of design thinking, and explore the narrative patterns of Italian innovation (vis-à-vis the Anglo-Saxon frameworks). Enjoy! The lecture is ava...

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In the new episode of Italian Innovators I present the story of GIULIO NATTA, the inventor of plastic and the first and only Italian scientist awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry. Starting from the Nobel ceremony in 1963, I examine both Natta’s path toward his scientific discovery and the unexpected outcomes that it generated. I reconstruct the s...

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In the new episode of Italian Innovators I present to you the story of GIULIA FALLETTI di BAROLO (1785-1864), the woman and entrepreneur who spearheaded the experimental development of the Nebbiolo grape into the world-renowned Barolo red wine. After marrying the Marquis Carlo Tancredi Falletti, the French-born Juliette Colbert (later Giulia Fallet...

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In the new episode of Italian Innovators I present the parallel stories of Arnoldo MONDADORI and Angelo RIZZOLI, founders of Italy’s leading publishing houses and master figures in 20th-century Italian culture. Enjoy the episode here.  From poverty to entrepreneurship, from magazines to an encyclopedia, from critical theory to cinema, Mondadori and...

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You might have heard of Liquore Strega, a 70-herb premium liqueur from Campania, or perhaps of GUIDO ALBERTI, its eclectic CEO in the mid-20th century, who co-created and sponsored the Premio Strega (Italy’s most important literary prize) and started a notable career as an actor in the 1960s.  I confess that I did not know of him. I came across his...

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