There is a photograph that is worth more than any statistics: one hundred and fifty young Campanians gathered at the Italian Institute of Culture in New York, to reason for the future, to talk about what can be built, not what has been left.
The history of southern emigration is one of the most recounted in Italy. Generations that leave, often without return ticket. The South that empties its universities, its families, its neighborhoods, and then looks at their children to stand elsewhere, proudly mixed with a point of resignation. Like leaving, by definition, goodbye.
What 081 is trying to prove is that it should not be like this. What to start today can also mean to accumulate something, skills, capital, network, vision, with the explicit intention of bringing it home.
The event opened with the institutional greetings of Alessandra Oliva, Consul Aggiunta d’Italia in New York, and Claudio Pagliara, Director of the Italian Institute of Culture, who stressed the value of these informal networks in strengthening the links between Italy and its community abroad. Then he took the word Umberto Lobina, president of 081, who told the three years of the organization with the concreteness of those who know that the numbers count, but not enough.
More than 50,000 euros donated to startup bells. More than 100 entrepreneurs put in contact with international funds. The stated goal: bringing private capital allocation to the South from 5 to 10%. Small numbers compared to the size of the problem, perhaps. But real numbers, in an area where vacuum is still the norm. And then the less financial, but not less important: the remaking of a fountain in the Sanità district, an open-air gym. Because the territory is not just a market to develop, it is a place where you live.
Among the interventions that marked the afternoon, that of Prof. Antonio Giordano, founder of the Sbarro Research Organization, scientific institution of reference in the panorama of international oncological research, born precisely from a son of Naples who built in the world without ever cutting the thread with his own land. A trajectory that already says everything about the type of history that 081 wants to multiply.
Italo Bocchino, journalist and former parliamentarian, brought a political and cultural reading of the phenomenon, reasoning how much the Mezzogiorno needs a ruling class that knows the world and has chosen to serve it.
Massimo Petrone, of Petrone Group, has emphasized how reality as 081 are fundamental to favor the return to the South of children with experiences matured abroad, how to attract skills and international networks is now more important than attracting only capital. He then added a concrete figure that says a lot about the state of things: Naples is now directly connected to New York, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Chicago and Montreal, with daily flights operated by United, Delta and American Airlines. A connectivity that until a few years ago was unthinkable, and that makes the return, even only temporary, much less complicated than the narrative about the isolation of the South would let it mean.
The moderation of the event was entrusted to Davide Ippolito, editor of New York, and the evening was one of those in which he came out with the impression of having witnessed something unpredictable.
To close, 081 presented what it calls its “equation”: universities, incubators, investors. A virtuous triangle, innovation that is born inside the universities of Centro-Sud, which transits through acceleration structures, which finds capital ready to bet. Simple to state, tremendously difficult to build. But at least, someone is trying to do it by method.
A thanks goes to the board of 081, composed by Dalila Ferrara, Mario Farina, Antonio Ciardiello and Martina De Nigirs and the sponsors that made the evening possible, E. Marinella, Caffè Borbone, De Nigris, Mionetto, La Piadineria and RED | OAK, thanks to which approximately 10,000 dollars were collected in support of the next initiatives of the association.
There are so many Neapolitans in the world who have done well. Some very well. Doctors, researchers, entrepreneurs, professionals distributed between New York, London, Dubai, San Francisco. For a long time, that dispersion was read only as a loss. And in part it is, it makes no sense to deny it.
But something’s changing. Starting is no longer necessarily a surrender. Among these one hundred and fifty boys in a Manhattan hall were those who made good fortune in New York, who works in finance in London, who opened a company in Dubai. And all were there to reason of Naples, of startup bells, of how to move a needle that has always moved little. It’s not nostalgia. It is something more pragmatic, and perhaps for this reason more credible.
The article Hundred fifty Neapolitans in New York, with a plan for the South. It’s from IlNewyorkese.
