What are the origins of vinegrowing?
It all started in the Middle East, in the Caucasus. More precisely on Mount Ararat, a place steeped in myth and legend. It’s the place where Noah’s Ark came to rest. And it’s the place where humans first started growing Vitis vinifera and hence making wine, at about the time they stopped being nomads and set up permanent settlements. Vines need tending to all year round, so there was no alternative but to settle down. The peoples living in Georgia, the Crimea, Turkey, Mesopotamia, and outlying regions around eight thousand years B.C. hit upon the idea and the beverage first. It was there and then that wine started its long journey through history.

Can you tell us something of its journey down to our times?
Well, from the Caucasus it moved into Persia, the modern day Iran and Iraq, and then on down to Egypt and across to Greece. It arrived into mainland Italy through Sicily about 4000 years ago. Wine-making knowledge and practice was given great impetus by the Etruscans first followed by the Romans. It was taken into northern Europe over Roman roads and waterways. Today wine is a worldwide beverage and business. Countries that until a few years ago lacked any vine-growing or wine-making tradition have now begun producing it themselves.

But today new beverages are being churned out all the time.
Wine, coffee, tea, oil have all been around for ages now. Attempts have recently been made to mix wine and fruit juices, but without much success. New drinks are mostly intended as thirst-quenchers. Those with history behind them are more associated with food, feasting, and above all socialising. They are bearers of a precious legacy and hence more steeped in culture and tradition.

French and Italian wines have traditionally been considered the best. Is it still so?
China and Turkey are today emerging countries for wine production and consumption. Competition can really be said to be a nuisance, though, from countries in the southern hemisphere, such as Australia, New Zealand, Chile, Argentina, and South Africa. Production costs are far lower and the climate is ideal for vine-growing.
Italy’s played a big role in conveying vine-growing and wine-making know-how to these countries. Actually, a lot of the scions in “breeches” imported by these countries originated in Italy. Today, Italy is still the number one supplier of winemaking technology to these new producers. Italy is still managing to keep the lead. But the countries that originally turned to Italy to acquire the necessary know-how and technology are now developing their own, which makes them even more competitive.

But how do they stand up quality-wise?
They’re making good wines alright, but not excellent ones.
Modern-day technology makes for appreciable results. There are two schools of thought, though, on the matter. Territory and tradition are guiding principles in the Latin school, and these two factors make for great diversity and originality. In new world countries vine variety and label come first. The result is only a few types of wine, but with marked characteristics.
French and Italian wines are still at the top, though. They’re the ones that get beaten at the highest bids at auctions.

What makes for excellence, then?
In a nutshell, it’s starting out with the best raw materials and improving on them. Prime quality’s got to be there from the start; location is what puts originality into the wine; and then human know-how, experience, and sensibility make for that special, extra touch.
Grape processing isn’t something that can be made up out of nothing. Blending, for instance, is an art that takes centuries to perfect. Coming up with a unique and perfect blend requires a rich humus of tradition. Technology can go so far; to reach beyond requires human sense and sensibility.

Tasters are indispensable, then, are they?
No doubt about it. Like for coffee, tasting and hence the tasters opinion are at the basis of grape variety selection and blending. We’ve been running a year-long postgraduate specialisation course on sensorial analysis for the last five years now at our Piacenza campus. It’s chiefly focused on wine, but there are also incursions into the realms of coffee and other foods and beverages. Actually, the course avails itself of professional coffee tasters for the sensorial part. The complex fragrances and flavour of coffee afford the perfect training- and testing ground for developing its participants’ olfactory skills.

What drove you to write such a book?
There’s not much fiction around capable of really telling us what the future will be like. Hollywood movies don’t seem to be able to provide us with any sort of reliable picture, and it’s generally difficult for the layperson to make much sense of what scientists call scenarios. It often in fact takes an expert to understand these highly formal models. I’ve always thought talking about the future in the form of a travel guide to be an ideal approach for it helps us imagine a place we would sooner or later like to go and visit ourselves.

What issues will you be dealing with?
I find the contrasting visions of catastrophists who predict an Armageddon and of diehard optimists who believe technology will change humankind for the better to the point that it will transcend itself very interesting. Both parties manage to be very persuasive and even enthralling with their accounts. That’s not surprising, seeing as the Apocalypse and the transcendental are two typically mystical themes.

From Blade Runner to 1984, via 2001 A Space Odyssey and Fahrenheit 451, literature and cinema seem to be obsessed with the idea of predicting the future. Let’s face it though, these predications don’t appear to have really guessed very much.
A prediction is never a dead cert and anyone who says so is either a fool or a charlatan. That’s not to say, though, that realistic predictions based on probabilistic calculations cannot be made. Of course, long-term predictions are far less reliable. The alternative that the future is wholly unpredictable is however wholly untenable from a psychological point of view.

Confucius says: “If you want to know the future, study the past”.
Scientifically and not clairvoyantly speaking, the only reliable discussions regarding the future are those based on a knowledge of the past. Climate studies are an example. We’ve managed to discover what sort of climate was prevalent hundreds of thousands of years ago thanks to analyses of Antarctic ice and realise that the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is far greater now than it ever was before. Such studies have also provided empirical data to fine-tune computer-processed predictive models, making for far more reliable scenarios.

Why is the twenty-first century considered a watershed?
I know one has to be careful in thinking that the times one is living in are always the most important. And yet, to some extent it may indeed be true for us. Constructing a global economy with real concern given for the atmosphere and the environment is an unprecedented challenge.
Today we’re capable of redesigning living organisms and taking evolution a new step forward. In a few years’ time we’ll be able to build new forms of artificial intelligence capable of competing with our own. What’s more, we have far more information today as to the state of the planet – indeed, some say too much – than ever before. All this suggests that we are at a crucial crossroads in history.

In the seventies there was much talk around such issues as over-population, the new ice-age, and the risk of an all-out nuclear confrontation. A lot of the talk was based on scientific analyses, yet these issues seem to have subsided from the media limelight.
There are fads in science just the same as in the media. That’s not to say these fears are all that obsolete, except perhaps for the new-ice-age. Population growth was indeed alarming, but has since luckily settled down. Indeed, many of the other predictions made at the time have not come to pass because of this change in population growth trends. But any serious demographer knows that such trends are subject to change. Nuclear weapons are still very much a threat and deserve far more attention than what they’re getting.

There’s a “friends-of-the-earth” motto that more or less says we haven’t so much inherited the world from our forebears but have it on loan from our descendents.
I also like the variant that raises the question: “Have we been good ancestors?”

But how can we make decisions as “good ancestors” would? Shouldn’t we be more cautious and avoid taking any action?
When taken literally the caution principle leads to absolute freeze mode, because there are simply too many things to be cautious of. We have to rationally consider, though, what sort of risks are reasonably worth taking. I don’t think the people who drilled the first oil-well can be blamed for global warming. It’s rather the responsibility of those who today don’t do their best to find and develop alternative energy sources. Being a good ancestor means working for a world where there are greater opportunities and freedom of choice, and fewer constrictions for those who come after us.

Are you optimistic?
Optimistic as far as our potential goes. Pessimistic, though, as to the consequences of our current recklessness.

Interview by Mauro Scanu

In your novels you usually tell about important and somehow controversial/conflicting historical characters, using their stories, and History in general, to read human complexity.
I try to see the historical figures first of all as figures marked by imperfections, not as monuments. And I’ve always written fiction novels on this… even about my own past. If you use an historical figure the reader knows, you have the chance to introduce a problem that could seem known, but is in fact confused, complex, new. And you must remember that I have a background as literature historian and as a consequence have a let’s say “familiar” relationship with characters like Strindberg or Hamsun, just to give a couple of examples. Of course in story-telling you can put the “monument” in the middle and observe it form three points of view: that of the literature historian, that of the reader and that of the writer. Furthermore, the confidence and at the same time the lack of confidence the writers put in other writers creates a very interesting dissonance. Writers, thanks to the typology of their job, know very well the writer lies to create truth. And they now how he does it.

Lewi Pethrus and Sven Lindman, the “God Twins” of the Pentecostal Movement, lose themselves in power flatteries. Marie Curie finds herself mutilated of her heart… does getting to an excellence point in a field necessarily imply losing purity and misplacing emotions?
No, you never loose purity. On the contrary you understand where pain creeps in. I’ve always thought the grain of sand that inside the oyster creates the pearl entails for the oyster a lifelong pain… the book I’m publishing in Autumn tells specifically about my hell.

Does an important and successful writer as you are think about renewing, not only in the themes he chooses but also in the way to express them? In a word, have you ever been afraid “to get stuck”?
In fact I’ve always been afraid every book I wrote could be my last. In the Eighties this fear became very close to materialise, as I was going to die. Then, on 5th February 1990, I came back to life. That moment words as “miracle” and “resurrection” became for me a reality.

What, in your opinion, can innovation nowadays be with respect to the Novel, and to writing in general? What, in the tradition of the novel, is necessary, unavoidable?
The one essential thing, in writing a novel, is the story telling. That’s it.

What did you loose, what could you never loose, in your journey as a writer?
What I hope with all my might is never to loose my good ear for prose. I think I’ve got a good ear for what I write. And this good ear has never deserted me. The very day it would abandon me I would never write a single word again.

Interview by Lilia Ambrosi

Chefs are keen at the idea of vintage decanted from the bottle to the dish. Keeping dishes that have made a House’s cooking history always on the menu brings forth memories and tells the gastronomic-conscious world the story of who one is.

In an interview of over ten years ago a renowned Catalan chef earnestly entertains the idea of opening a number of restaurants each promoting one of his vintage menus to prevent the record of his culinary inventiveness fading away from one year to the next.

Not a bad idea at all. Just think if you could follow the progress of your favourite chef or dish in fifteen meals over fifteen years. It’s a bit like falling in love with an artist and her works and wanting to find out more about them and what they were like in the past, tracing them back to her first hesitant steps. As much as this sort of quest may be undertaken for artists thanks to all sorts of records available in museums, book, film and music libraries, and so on, tracking down a chef’s culinary delights and masterpieces isn’t quite as easy. What guides, recipe collections, critical reviews and the like there may be are scattered and far too scanty to satisfy the foodlover’s curiosity let alone her taste buds.

Opening a millésimé restaurant calls for a culinary Broadway-like location. That’s not an irrelevant paragon; patrons in fact come from all over the world to see blockbuster performances on Broadway, and thanks to this inexhaustible global catchment area a show can be billed for years. Admittedly, for most chefs a millésimé restaurant rarely goes beyond a dream, but vintage dishes put in their appearance on many an inspired menu.

Since 1998 Moreno Cedroni at La Madonnina del Pescatore in Senigallia on the Adriatic Coast of Italy specially provides for a vintage dish on the menu. Why? “I find specifying the year I invented that dish helps to mark my progress. It’s like when one reads a book. It helps the reader to better savour and appreciate what he’s reading if he knows when the book was written, whether early in the writer’s career or later, when the writer had reached full maturity”. In other words, the vintage dish grows with its creator. The Senigallia-style brodetto (fish stew) has come a long way since its inception in 1984. It is in fact one of the oldest dishes on La Madonnina del Pescatore’s menu. As much as it may still owe its distinctive flavour to that final sprinkling of vinegar, the way the different varieties of fish that go into the brodetto are cooked has changed, and that makes a difference.

There’s no denying a vintage dish has sentimental value for its creator, and that’s reason enough to want to consistently keep it on the menu. It may in fact be that that particular dish won its creator acclaim and fame through the specialised media, as in the case of Ciccio Sultano, master of hob, oven and everything else in between at the Duomo in Ragusa Ibla, Sicily. It may even be that since 2001 new and increasingly refined and subtle gourmet-friendly nuances have come to enrich the culinary performances at the Duomo in Ragusa, but Sultano can’t forget that the D.O.P. (appellation grade) Ragusano cheese tortino (pie) “was where it all started for me”.

Other times there are dishes that have made gastronomic history or at least attained celebrity status. The undressed raviolo (dumpling) or the risotto (stewed rice) served with gold leaf topping by Gualtiero Marchesi, superstar chef and proprietor of Albereta at Erbusco sul Naviglio in Northern Italy, still deserve and get authorial photos and rave reviews, and even make the front cover of glossy magazines.

There’s a very straight and narrow path along which the great hallmark dish, the vintage creation, may walk as a proud statement of culinary identity, deviating from which it can turn into an irksome, ball-and-chain staple seriously stifling a chef’s inventive flare and desire to travel down new avenues of self-expression. That’s something Fulvio Pierangelini of Il Gambero Rosso fame at San Vincenzo on the Tuscan coast in Italy can all too sadly vouch for. His personal culinary nadir was his greatest success and biggest favourite, namely sauté king-prawns on a bed of chickpea puree. Following on over exposure by the media in 1986, there was hardly a patron who wouldn’t order the dish. Like a jammed cog, at the height of its popularity the vintage dish had debased its creator to the role of self-emulator.

Under such conditions, a chef can turn against his creation. Torn between love and loathing, he destroys, deletes, indeed shakes off the shackles of his culinary inventive hang-up. And then he can start freshly and freely inventing again.

But time heals all wounds, and at a ladies’ luncheon especially organised for over sixtyfivers living in the quaint Tuscan sea-side resort, Pierangelini felt confident and in control enough to revive the famous dish for his two-hundred women guests. Once again, as in the beginning, a standing ovation. A stirring experience, for the chef but also for the ladies, for many of whom the legendary sauté king-prawns on a bed of chickpea puree was a first-timer.

There’s a type of restauranteuring that seems to shun creative cooking and is coy at innovating the menu. The vintage menu harkening back to the restaurant’s heyday is more or less consciously felt to be a safe, unassailable haven in such eateries and as such is made to bravely stand the test of time unchanged. It confers the place a solid identity, even though not much more than a drawing-board-drafted one. “Never change a winning team”, as the saying goes, may be rendered in the culinary context as: “never change a winning menu”.

At least one illustrious example of such a trend comes to mind. Nobu has been rigorously serving the same menu ever since 1994. It started out in New York, the gastronomic Broadway wonderland. Seeing its blockbusting success the culinary show then hit the road and in a short time fifteen branches had sprung up across four continents. To seek, discover and enjoy have given way to staid reproduction. Instead of inventing new menus the ticket seems to be that of opening up more and more new Nobus around the world.

What applies to a winning team also applies to a menu, and what’s more who needs evolution when we have cloning! Fair enough, food-lovers seeking an artful and creative cuisine may cringe at such a policy statement but business is business and what’s good for business…

When any dish in any cuisine can boast being vintage it proudly witnesses to the cuisine’s gastronomic achievements. It’s a dish with a story to tell, the story of its inventor, and at the same time a token of what she or he was like at a given point in time. Sure enough, it’s the hub and hinge of personal and professional culinary identity. But it can easily grow too top-heavy, tilt the wrong way and drag its bearers down. Identities that manage to avoid such a pitfall and which are the ones we prefer are those that may be said to be “in progress”. What makes bearers of such identities especially appealing is their openness and broadmindedness. Such attitudes are born of unceasing self-inquiry, for they never stop questioning who and what they were; who and what they are; who and what they may be. In the world of gastronomic inventiveness they’re the sort of individuals who know how to fully conjugate the verb “to cook”, drawing from it their present and reaching out for the future.

What can you tell us about this epic “Made in Italy” story of your firm and family?
Actually it’s not quite a thousand years. It all started in Pisa way back in the thirteenth century with Puccio, our forebear. It’s the Medici, though, that made the family’s fortune. The Pucci were their political advisers after the failed conspiracy of the Pazzi, where they had played a part.

Several centuries down the line, then, there’s my great, great grandfather, Emilio Pucci. He’s gone down in history as being an enlightened mayor of Florence, at the time Napoleon I was emperor. That’s when the family came upon the title of “counts of the empire”. The Emperor also generously gave him all the furniture for a bedroom, in period style, of course; we still preserve it today. My ancestors were essentially landed gentry, with estates in Val D’Elsa and a reputation for being progressive.

My father Emilio had strong family ties of Russian extraction. It shows up in his original and creative use of colours, in a way reminiscent of Faberge’s enamel colours. But he also had Neapolitan ancestry. I’d say he had quite a legacy to live up to – an explosive brew, if ever there was one. His aesthetic tastes and impassioned social and political commitment all witness to that.

He was highly versatile and talented – truly a man of the Renaissance. He was an aviation officer with an excellent service record and many medals to show for it by the end of the war. But times were tough and he found himself having to teach Italian and work as a skiing instructor in Switzerland to get by. Anyway, he designed a skiing outfit that was photographed, and the picture ended up being brought to the attention of Diane Vreeland, Harper’s Magazine’s legendary chief editor. She decided what my father’s fate was to be. Not that he didn’t have qualms about it. He just simply couldn’t see how an aviation officer and ace pilot could turn into a fashion designer.

After the war Italy had to be put back on its feet and taught to walk all over again. This great national resurgence couldn’t have found a better and more fitting place to flourish than Florence, with its great Renaissance legacy. Here was a real hotbed of creativity, craftsmanship, inventiveness, and manual skill at their best. Simonetta, Gucci, Ferragamo are just some of the names of the fabulous flowers that blossomed in this milieu. It can safely be said that that’s where the “Made in Italy” saga all started out from. Food, design, fashion. Italian excellence. Only France had done as much before us. Passion, tradition and intense living, all spiced with a desire to show the world what we were capable of. Truly a dream fifty years ago and one we hardly dared believe would ever come true. But it has, all down the line.

What are the House’s hallmark values, do you think?
High-powered inventiveness combined witha modern vision in an Italian dressing, which translate into a life-style, both charming and refined. And of course the whole-hearted, fullbodied, single-minded commitment of the women and men behind it all. There’s no other place in the world quite like this, where an entrepreneur is so earnestly impassioned and enamoured of his enterprise. And the results are infectious. Regardless of the sector, it’s this ardour that makes the “made in Italy” style, quality and difference.

Our firm operates in a dimension where the past and the future routinely intermingle. What’s been, lives on in us as real and effective as ever, and what will be is already alive in our thoughts, ideas and commitments, and both mutually influence each other.

Could any of this have happened anywhere else aside from Florence?
What makes Florence the unique place it is has undoubtedly played an important role. We live submerged in pure beauty. All these fabulous colours and forms that surround us: the red of the terracotta, the blue of the sky, the countless details of our inimitable urban surroundings. All it takes to behold such beauty is to gaze out of the window. Stendhal’s syndrome is at home here in Florence. The eye seeks beauty and is critically watchful of everything we do as we attempt to infuse our work with it. We’re a stone’s throw here from Cathedral Square. Brunelleschi’s dome is just around the corner there. I like working with the lads on the prints spread out on the floor in this over-five-hundred-year-old palace, ornamented with Pucci-designed carpets, furniture designed by Cappellini, nineteenth century frescoes on the wall, and eighteenth century stucco decorations.

The challenge is to be able to carry all this beauty across into the contemporary world in a modern-day garb. We look to the past, but never as antiquarians, because we’re careful never to loose sight of the future. The eye, as I said, is ever attentive and critical and shuns hype, glitter and glamour for their own sake. We definitely don’t want to be showy.

As for me, I was born amidst all this.

I’m an enthusiast of contemporary art and if there’s one thing in common with fashion it’s that both raise questions that simply cannot be brushed aside; one’s always starting all over again, reconsidering the direction one’s taken and where it’s leading.

Florentine to the marrow yet cosmopolitan by vocation: what’s it like for Pucci to be so deeply rooted in a cultural tradition and place and at the same time be a leading international player in the luxury commodity sector?
My memories of father are always associated with suit cases, and that’s marked my upbringing and education. It’s really a matter of always being open and receptive to the world at large, to whatever’s new and different, and then translating and declining it in terms and styles that are close to home. Going global is an enriching experience and a challenge. When it’s done the right way it means conveying one’s sense of place and belonging, the best of one’s culture and cherished traditions to an increasingly worldwide public.

Marina Abramovic and her boyfriend Ulay run in great strides towards each other, as if attracted by a magnet.
Their bodies slam into each other. They fall, they get up, they do it again and again, until they are totally wiped out. Is this nonsense? Maybe, but it is definitely passion. Only a few images like this performance, staged at the Venice Biennale back in the seventies and documented today in nostalgic black and white strips of film, are capable of synthesising so accurately the physical and violent but at the same time moral and mental temperamental drive that makes us go at all costs in a specific direction. No matter what the consequences may be: nothing can be done to counter a determination that goes beyond the notion of personal safety itself.
A man and a woman. But also a mountain or a desert: what makes Hamish Fulton walk to Japan, to the Himalayas, up alpine glaciers or down endless stretches covered with underbrush? It cannot be his fondness for photography, since he has produced only very few pictures that are hardly more interesting than postcards. It cannot be that he wants to challenge his physical fitness, as this would more likely be the case for a mountaineer or a professional sportsman. Fulton is an artist, instead. His form of art is walking, showing us this inextinguishable drive, this having to walk for miles and miles, regardless of the fact there is no special reason for doing so. The special reason is experiencing passion, even though in his case it is a passion for nature and for perceiving it through all his senses, including tiredness and hunger.

Haim Steinbach is in a shop. He looks around; touching, buying, picking, captured by an irresistible attraction for objects and their design: in his gaze there is a dash of madness, but it has almost nothing to do with the desire to own things. He wants to understand how shapes change one season after the other, one fashion, as it were, after the other, he wants to understand the reason for new fashions and how new lifestyles are embodied in objects and shop windows.

In his novel L’opéra, Emile Zola tells the story of a painter who destroys his own life because he cannot finish a painting , his only painting, the very one for the sake of which he gradually gives up his beloved one, his friends, his own health. The writer sharpened what he saw: painters like Cézanne, mostly, but also Manet and the other Impressionists, whose lives were driven by an unreasonable and inscrutable fury which, however, became understandable when viewed from their stance.
Romantic exaggerations? Maybe. But even in the driest years of minimal and conceptual art, what fervour lies behind the gestures that reduced sculptures to mere boxes, copper plates or cement blocks, or behind the tautological phrases the young Joseph Kosuth wrote out using a string of neon light? Even the action of reducing is born from an urgent need, from being overwhelmed by a need that is asking in no uncertain terms to be heeded.

Perhaps history, at least the history of art, is always written by rational people; surely, however, those who make history, those who build it before someone else comes along to arrange it in tidy categories, those are people who seem to be fanatics.
Otherwise, how can someone be brave enough to renew something – this holds true for the expression of art as it does for any other expression – if he/she is not driven by such a force? Reasonableness leads to diplomacy, it knows how to negotiate and wait, but it has never conquered territories or invented paths that no one had ever walked on before.
There is no need, however, to die or consume oneself with solitary work as does the main character in L’opéra. Passion reveals itself also in much less sentimental ways and in teamwork: take Andy Warhol and his Factory, with its walls covered with aluminum foil, a place half of New York went to and certainly its noisiest part; imagine him as he touches up the poster of Marilyn in Niagara and then hands it to his assistants so that they can apply a gold- or orange-colored background: how different, for example, from the physical and individual gestures of any German Expressionist or of Emilio Vedova.
Despite his open coldness and his ability to run a real factory, also Warhol’s life and actions were dominated by a vector which went well beyond reason and the possibility of stopping it: he tried to stop being an artist, soon after he had been attacked, but he was forced to start again. There is nothing you can do about it when novelty runs in your blood, when you do something without knowing why but just knowing that you simply must do it, when you live in that merciful condition that makes you look ahead and that’s that. In ancient times it was called “enthusiasm” (literally “entering in god”), today we prefer to talk about “strong motivation”.

No pioneer lives outside this condition and every artist works in the hope of becoming a pioneer. But for this to happen, if there is passion one must know how to recognize it and treat it properly: if it is matched with stupidity, then it will burn out very rapidly. It must be freed from all collateral thrusts, as if they were weeds, such as the desire for security, immediate acknowledgement by the public and rapid economic gratification. Every time Brancusi sold one of his works, he would cry. And passion should be developed sternly: it is not enough to slam into each other’s body once, you need also to get up and start all over again.

For a company, the past is never just the past. It is an opportunity for growth, driving it to explore new directions. Ducati, one of the most famous motorbike manufacturers in the world, has opened a museum at its premises in Borgo Panigale (BO), to utilise its own “home made” resources. Motorbikes, engines, photographs, and drawings tell a typically Italian story of people, experiences and innovations, some of which are still used as the basis for new designs. Marco Montemaggi, who created and set up the Ducati museum, tells us about the project.

Where did the idea for the Ducati museum come from?
In 1996, I was 26. The managing director of Ducati at the time, Federico Minoli, invited me to a race in which Ducati bikes were competing, and told me: «I’ll give you everything you need, but you’ve got six months to design a Ducati museum. Six months, not a day longer». I didn’t know where to start or who to ask, but thanks to a team which included Livio Lodi, now the museum’s director, the Ducati museum was ready six months later.

Why build a company museum?
Before the work started, Minoli explained to me that Ducati didn’t just want a museum in order to preserve its history. The Ducati museum was supposed to be a communications tool (for commercial benefits, marketing and image promotion), a trademark for the company, a way of preserving and using its own heritage and a way to form partnerships with other local businesses. With the bikes and the history of their racing successes, it was to convey the passion of an Italian company that often managed to keep its bikes and riders ahead of the rest, although its resources and means were far inferior to those of its rivals.

How can a company museum provide creative ideas that can solve the complex problems of the modern business world? In other words, how can the past teach us about the present?
As we collected material for the museum, scattered all over the world, we came across all kinds of records and artefacts: forgotten motorbikes and period photographs. We transferred them all to digital format and archived everything, and now the company can draw on well-organised materials that can be used for any application, such as the “Seventies” merchandising.
Not only that, but designers from all over the world visit the museum to study the old bikes and find inspiration. For example, the “Mike Hailwood Evolution”, a bike which evoked the unique model produced for the famous British rider, was designed by Pierre Terblanche based on the designs kept in the museum.
It is also a “living” museum, used for meetings, gatherings and public presentations, thanks to its helmet-shaped hall which seats up to 45 people.

How much do the company’s employees take an interest in the museum? Does it build team spirit?
The museum has merely reinforced the team spirit that has always distinguished people who work for Ducati. Even now, many visitors are former employees who bring their children and grandchildren to see motorbikes they spent their lives building. Many employees even visit the museum during their lunch breaks, or take their friends and family at the weekend.
This sense of belonging to a community has always been part of this company’s success, in racing and on the market. This is why Ducati wanted to thank its staff, past and present, by dedicating the “memory wall” to them – a huge photograph at the museum entrance dating from the 1930s, showing the entire workforce all together.

The concept of production does not seem to describe your work very well. Can you think of a word to replace it?
I think the concept of “humanising production” is the principle of our work. Over time, Humberto and myself have given the Italian firms we work with a concept of “hand made” that rises above the banal level, that gives the product a more human feel, more personality. We try to create a dialogue with our means of production, to try and reconcile our ideas with what industry demands.

Is the fact of being Brazilian, children of a country built on a mosaic of cultures and experiences, and living in a society with huge inequalities something that has influenced your work?
We are both lucky and unlucky at the same time. Having grown up and continuing to live in Brazil has given us an insight into many social and economic issues, but we have also encountered a vast wealth of natural resources, which provide real inspiration for our creativity. It is precisely this flexibility in communicating which has allowed us to transport our designs to Italy while keeping our own identity intact.

How do your designs develop? What sources of inspiration have allowed you to reinterpret everyday objects under a new guise?
Most of our inspiration comes from the streets – our products are like portraits of the city of São Paulo which we have a constant dialogue with. A city with twenty million inhabitants, with its traffic and chaotic architecture, which we have managed to portray on the most traditional level, despite everything. We have described the city effectively by using humble materials in our designs. What look to be ordinary, unremarkable materials are presented in a new light, through
technological intervention, but they still maintain their identity, their tradition and their history.

How does the concept of imperfection, which is a key element of “hand made” products, interact with your work?
Imperfections in our work are certainly a value, because they make each piece unique. They give the object a personality during the assembly stage, which avoids the standardised feel of serial production.

Does the recovery of this manual dimension give you a professional and personal satisfaction that cannot be found in standardised production?
Mechanisation damages people. Nowadays we see assembly lines which are increasingly being automated, but we think of an assembly line as a team effort, almost a social process that can create a community and cultivate new ideas.

Interview by Marco Minuz

The difference between excitement and surprise can be seen clearly in modern society, where people are mainly focused on surprising rather than exciting. Is this a need dictated by a general way of life – perhaps we don’t want to get too involved on an emotional level?
If I offer a product using an advertising slogan based on surprise, the product and the brand will always be linked to that specific situation. If, on the other hand, the product is offered in a way that can excite, the message becomes deeper and is not limited to the product in itself. It involves all the values that a brand can transmit. An advertising slogan based on surprise only has a short-term impact, while an ad that can arouse a strong emotional impact, even if it needs a long time to establish itself, will always have very long-lasting effects. Of course, it’s much easier to produce an advertising campaign based purely on the principle of surprise.

How can you create excitement through an industrial process?
Our products excite, but that’s not just due to the object itself. In our case, the product is a symbol of a complex process, it reflects our history. Some time ago I was in Paris, at Karl Lagerfeld’s show for Chanel. I think the event was organised in a very intelligent way – in the centre of the circular catwalk was a huge wooden replica of Coco Chanel’s famous jacket, a symbol of how the company’s present and future are always linked to its past. It was no coincidence that at the end of the show, the models all walked back into that huge jacket. Our products, like the clothes at that show, are always linked to the story of our company and the people who made it what it is, their hopes and dreams. My responsibility towards new designers, salesmen and workers is to keep moving in this direction. That’s something which is inextricably linked to the excitement that an object can transmit. The emotions which an object can arouse always come from its history, its context, its ability to relate to other situations. An object in itself is nothing – it’s excitement that makes objects, and the situations they can create, eternal.

How can we preserve this ability to create objects that excite?
Behind every project there’s always an awareness of our own being, and what that has created. We introduce our designers to our past products, our factories, how we work, and the surrounding context. We try to explain what it means to design in tandem with architecture, because our products only become complete, even from an emotional point of view, when they are part of a context. An emotion is never complete if you just think about the project – it is only completed if you can put it into context. But we should also think about two other things: art and craftsmanship. We produce mass-made objects in line with the definition of design, but we try to make sure that they embody that spirit, that ability to excite, which only art can have. It is no coincidence that many of our products are created in artisanal, almost artistic environments, and only then are they reproduced on a large scale. When we reproduce them, we try to preserve that original feeling.

Today, almost everyone wants instant celebrity status, those fifteen minutes of fame promised by Andy Warhol, using the tired old mechanism of surprise. How can you tell a designer to focus just on the emotional aspect?
We look for designers with great depth, who can understand the value of emotion and apply it to the field of design. Professionals who can interpret and respect our history and bring it up to date. Designers who know how to work with time – the past, the present, and the future.

Interview by Marco Muniz

But when I actually listen, and when listening becomes a tool necessary for a job in which you approach people and situations in order to create change, I notice that it is a skill that varies over time, expressed by a subjective intention or created by the circumstances. Part of it comes from within, while part of it you suddenly find next to you, almost by chance. Listening is a travel companion.

On the other hand, you really listen when you meet someone who wants or needs to be listened to, or in order to find something that might be important and seems to have been missed.

Listening, an unreliable companion, has accustomed me to perceiving a company in terms of history and geography.

I quickly realised that I found it fascinating (and still do) to listen to the stories of individuals and groups. Colourful tales are transformed into legends that represent a social event or a moment in the evolution of a company or other organisation. Narration gives a linear order to the sequence of events, and unlike reality it has the appeal of cohesion. It tells of forces moving in what, with hindsight, seems to be a well-defined direction. It helps to simplify and give meaning.

But extended opportunities for listening open up another dimension that to me is even richer, the dimension that gives you a glimpse of  organisational landscapes characterised by diverse voices, motives and a multitude of trajectories, signs often hidden by the emerging story,  territories whose logic and vibrancy can perilously unbalance the system but can also create the conditions for positive change.

In this sense, taking the time to listen allows me to tap into the complexity, change-related tensions and the abundance of knowledge which exists in organisations, in order to bring effective procedures and projects to life.

But it also brings me closer to a fundamental aspect of corporate relations, when they are not merely based on power and hierarchy: mutual recognition. This is a dimension that will emerge if you accept the fact that listening has a certain element of gratuitousness. It asks you to give up your time and yourself without constantly thinking of the ends to be achieved. This way, by dedicating space to other people, you can build substantial relationships, understand and recognise others’ experiences, individual and collective identities. It is also a way to enable the listener to engage and achieve recognition in his own right.

A toy train emerges from the mouth of Jannis Kounellis. No, it’s not a return to one’s childhood. It’s rather a way of acknowledging to what extent the great railroad age, the age that revolutionised freighting, the age when corn used to travel in jute sacks loaded in cars running on steel tracks stretching, far away from where the crop was grown, has become a part of us, of our very bodily makeup even. It was but a century ago that all this took place, a preview of what was to become known as “globalisation”. It was an auspicious beginning, indeed a deliverance for it dispelled famine and apportioned wealth as never before. For one thing, cotton reached far and wide from the lands where cacti dotted the landscape.
The price for all this, a price that with remarkable foresight the artist prophesised would have to be paid, was to be the loss of any certainty in relation to what we like to call Western Civilisation. His Greece, our and equally his Rome, the customary proportions of an architecture even in which the dimensions of a bed are similar to those of a door, would reveal themselves as part of a mind-frame that by reaching out to the world had set the stage for its own disintegration. Kounellis cannot but define himself as a painter, as a champion of the classical tradition. And it’s not so much out of political reasons but simply because he can’t be otherwise. That’s where he hails from, and so do we. It’s enough to realise that even the colour of a live parrot or the form of a wardrobe may be a source of inspiration and the subject matter of painting.
A train erupting from a mouth may indeed be a sign of nostalgia but also of something else besides. It may foreshadow what will one day be history, suggesting that we, here and now, learn to simultaneously cooperate and compete with all that which owing to different histories and even more geographical separation cannot in any way be called Western Civilisation.

“In the eyes of the young I want to see the flame, in the eyes of the elder, the light”.

(*)
Puer = child
Senex = adult, elder

BARS ARE PLACES OF SIMPLE THINGS: WHAT DO YOU FIND STIMULATING IN BARS?
Human beings are creative beings but also social beings. They are productive in a playful sense. People seek that which is apparently useless, albeit maintaining the contrary. Therefore, meeting-places offer opportunities for lively relations, which are nothing other than situations of entertainment, in the sense of amusement, of the pleasure to do things that are free from our commitment to survival. We Italians have different types of relations with bars: sometimes it is the place for quick and fast enjoyment, the place where one can release the daily pressure built up by practical matters at any time.
There is nothing equal to the pleasure of entering a bar and having an espresso or cappuccino at the counter.
Everyone can relate to this but it can be different at the same time.

HOW MUCH IMPORTANCE DO YOU ATTACH TO TEAMWORK WHEN STARTING OFF AN ART PROJECT? DO YOU PREFER TO START OFF ON YOUR OWN?
There are some works you can only do on your own and there are works which must be done together with others. There is a certain way of life that is developing, whereby we tend to come together in small groups or in important meeting venues, and this trend involves all ages. It is impossible to work on your own when you are investigating social transformation processes like I am. This procedure requires comparing many different disciplines but, at the same time, it also requires a common strain, a common interest in social changes and renewals. I have always worked on both levels: personal and interpersonal.
In any case, my individual productions are always open towards the presence of a common reality and, therefore, towards the participation of others.
Take for instance “Quadri Specchianti” which I started producing in 1961: spectators become the direct elements of the work of art and the main actors of the show; or take “Cittaldellarte”, which is a work site that is open towards interdisciplinary and intersectional work.

WHAT VALUES COME FIRST IN LIFE?
First comes the value of communication between individuals. Other fundamental values are: relationships with the people with whom you are closest to, such as your family, and the value of the social efforts put into achieving a better atmosphere of civilisation.
Today, when we talk about civilisation, we must do so in global terms. This clearly entails the notion of “loving different” cultures, races, personalities, tastes, kinds. I have a saying: “eliminate distances and keep differences”. This expresses also my spiritual, economic and political view, in other words my fundamental values.

illy will be present at the international art exhibition of the Venice Biennale for the fourth time.

THINK WITH YOUR SENSES, FEEL WITH YOUR MIND. ART IN THE PRESENT.

Is the title of the 52nd International Art Exhibition curated by Robert Storr and organised by the Venice Biennale chaired by Davide Croff. Installed at the Arsenale and Giardini, it features the work of about a hundred international artists. “This exhibition looks to the future, not the past”, is how Storr defines the broad scope that places all the guest artists and their works on the same level. Each work is there to speak for itself and for the whole display, the similarities are designed to highlight the diversity of emotions, materials and subject matter featured in works of different styles, related to the present day.

77 countries and a large number of spinoff events will be presenting their works in the city centre, the Giardini and the Arsenale, where the new Italian Pavilion curated by Ida Gianelli will be inaugurated. At the Arsenale there will be a Turkish Pavilion and Check List of the Sindika Dokolo African Collection of Contemporary Art curated by Fernando Alvim and Simon Njami. At the Giardini, the Venetian Pavilion presents a tribute to Emilio Vedova. The Venice Biennale is offering an invitation to the general public, together with Art 38 Basel, documenta 12 and skulptur projekte münster 07, with the home page www.grandtour2007.com, and the catalogue for the 52nd exhibition is published by Marsilio.

We had a coffee and an interesting chat with chairman Davide Croff, on the subject of sentimental-mente…

You are a manager: a graduate in Business Studies and Economics, Director of financial Affairs at the fiat Group, CEo of the Banca Nazionale del lavoro and now Chairman of the Biennale since 2004: these all seem to be roles in which emotion plays no part. Is that true?

I’m afraid I have to disagree: every job, even in the business world, contains a high emotional charge if it is done with passion, and out of passion.  I’ll give you a personal example: my 10 years at FIAT, apart from the rich and varied professional experience, were characterised by an incredible passion for the “car product”. Unconsciously, the car was the real reason why I started at the company, and it bolstered my enthusiasm and enjoyment in the years that followed… Another piece of my life: BNL, 20,000 employees, a professional bank which is deeply rooted in the history of Italy, open to the world, and all the staff have a very strong sense of belonging. 14 years after I stopped working there, I think that all my colleagues will remember the misty eyes of their managing director during the last meeting.

But let’s move on to what I’m doing now: at the Venice Biennale, emotion is the real core business.

We offer pure emotion: with a modern art installation in the gardens, a large architectural project that might soon go down in history, a world film première at the Lido, a theatrical performance in a local field, modern dance, a concert, and why not, the photographs of our past and the great names of our history.

As you can see, emotion is a common theme that runs throughout the whole of a manager’s career, even though it might take different forms.

The result of an institution such as the Biennale comes from the work of a strong, enthusiastic team. how, and with what means, can you motivate the team?

We often think that the main motivational tools available to a manager are salaries, bonuses and stock options. They are certainly important. But the things that allow you to build a team are credibility, your powers of persuasion, enthusiasm and most of all, having clear ideas about how to direct the team’s work.  The salary at the Biennale isn’t that high, there are no real bonuses to speak of, and there are no stock options, so people with responsibility have an even more important role to play in terms of providing motivation.

A team is not just the sum total of individual and professional abilities. It becomes a team when it manages to express something that goes beyond individual contributions. Everyone has his own qualities and his own story, which is why relations should always be calibrated to suit individual personalities. The “chief scout” has to be able to lead the team as a whole, to communicate with and handle each man and woman on an individual level.

I’ll give you an example of the human machine that is the real strength of the Venice Biennale: the 24 hours leading up to the great event, when a world made up of a thousand people unites and pulls together in an incredible way.

If you walk past the gardens or the Lido a day before opening, you’d probably think those doors were never going to open…

But this is where everyone’s generosity, ingenuity and enthusiasm come in. People on all levels give of their best, in the firm belief that the success of the exhibition, event or festival represents the success of all those involved. Everyone’s needed, even those who make only the smallest contribution.

The strength of the team at the Biennale (I’d like to take this opportunity to thank them), is precisely that: they have a solid vision, they know how to accept and handle a challenge, and they keep their nerve. We will keep going as we always have done, on a never-ending quest for new ideas. During an architecture exhibition, we work on the next art show, while putting together ideas and links to the dmt festival or the film festival. To get the motor running and engage the gears, you need intellectual ability, certainly, but also emotion. Always.

“What the hell is it?”. American historian and writer Paul Collins’ literary travels, published in Italy by Adelphi, usually start from this question, which struck him when he came across some oddity found in an old book. A cultured, meticulous curiosity rooted in the need to understand what has been buried in and by history. To mark a passion for books as precious tokens of our humanity, books he loved so much he founded a site, collinslibrary.com, to save unusual, out-of-print literary works, but also to mark a compassionate, deep interest for the weird, monomaniac characters Whitman defined as “the endless unknown heroes”. Whose lives the author recounts, for example, in Banvard Follies and that in some way enter his own world, when he learns that his son Morgan, aged three, is autistic. Collins then searches history for a way to understand, and his research results in a deeply interesting book, Not Even Wrong. A book as an exploration, through writing and memory, between sense and sensibility, of one of the many territories lying on the boundary of what most of us think of as “normal”.

Was your book Not Even Wrong also an attempt to rationalize an event, when your son was diagnosed as autistic, that had emotionally confused you, even forcing you to “reconsider” yourself?

It was indeed an attempt to make sense of what was happening – and  for me, as a historian, the easiest way to make sense of it was through history. The key moment for me as a writer was discovering the research of Professor Baron-Cohen of Cambridge University, who proved that autistic traits ran through families and specific professions. In other words, that autism was not a singular aberration, but rather a culmination of genetic and societal forces. For me, it was one of those few moments in one’s life when you realize that the way you look at yourself and everything around you has permanently and profoundly changed. And the history that this insight embodied – which my own family was just one example of –became the driving force behind the book.

Autistic people often have very special intellective abilities, but find it hard to live and express their emotional world….

People who are severely autistic and emotionally troubled are often noticeably frustrated by their attempts to communicate, and naturally anything that can be done to help that situation should be done.  Some autistic people, though, just delight in different things from most of us.  I’m not sure that Morgan, for instance, is any less happy than other children.  He takes a profound joy in music – sometimes falling asleep at night clutching a French Horn.  As he gets older, he’s taking somewhat more notice of other children, a prospect that both delights me and worries me for all the challenges he’ll face.  But I think it worries me a lot more than it worries him.  He prioritizes differently from me.

In Not Even Wrong you recount how, being at Microsoft during the designing of a software for autistic people, you realized the brain trust of the famous firm was mainly composed of people who often relate to what we consider “reality” in a different way. Do you think this can, in any way, affect the quality of their work, and in particular when it deals with the so called “social” problems of life?

It’s entirely possible that writers or programmers don’t understand a typical person’s perspective, which is why “Beta testing” is so important. Beta Testing is a phase which takes place before software is sold to the public, when a group of customers are asked to subject the product to “real world” demands; they report back to the company with any problems they encounter.  It’s an essential step with software to have this “real world” trial run, because so many programmers are…. well, in their own world.  Problems or questions that are confusing to the rest of us might not be confusing to them.

Can you tell us if and how feelings can be in conflict with or add value to your work as an historian?

I think that, to the extent that I can serve as a proxy for the reader, my feelings and my narrative presence are useful in a historical work.  My work may seem to be about me or my family: but it isn’t, not really.  I would find such a book intolerable to read, and even less tolerable to write. I experience feelings in an illogical and unpredictable way, like everyone else: but I use them very carefully and pragmatically in art, and only to the extent that they illuminate and humanize a subject.  When a book becomes less about history and more about the person telling it, then it becomes narcissistic — and that, to me, is contrary to the purpose of history, which is to see beyond our immediate experience.

Interview by Lilia Ambrosi