Partecipa al Festival come volontario

An infrastructural communication network, the skill to attract and retain the most talented individuals with high profile life standards, and enterprises producing high added value goods and services: these are the winning factors that increase the value of a territory.
Unlike the impressions that it may suggest, or the stories of its seven-millions inhabitants, the big metropolitan region of the Venice area has a leading role in the world markets thanks to its medium enterprises, just because it operates an excellent integration with the immigrant people. Besides it boasts the highest levels of schooling and the highest number of readers, thriving cultural activities, and it sometimes reaches levels of absolute excellence in university education. But there’s more.
There’s another easily undervalued feature, that is an open approach to the world
and the skill of its enterprises to interact in a world-wide market, a clear inheritance of the Venice Republic, which, as it is well-known, earned its fortune thanks to this very inclination.
As in the past, where the bound between economic development, cultural life and technologic innovation has contributed to the flourishing of every civilization, also today these three elements merge into an European and world-wide model of conceiving the enterprise.

The problem lies in the fact that the institutions, the entrepreneurial and cultural  worlds, and the citizens’ conscience have to learn to deal with a “metropolitan” dimension, and imagine new human and environmental balances for the years to come.
The rapid transformation that the Venice area has went through during the last four decades and that has turned it in one of Europe’s richest and most competitive areas, has happened in such an overwhelming way, so to appear, even to natives, obscure and hardly understandable.
Today the cities almost turned to metropolis, the detached houses boasted by the 70’s parvenus are eclipsed by dozens of skyscrapers designed by world-famous architects, cities like Padova, Venice and Treviso, have turned into a “big Venice” and already have an inner ring (Passante) and an outer ring which will be soon carried out (Pedemontana), but oddly enough many institutions, and politics and cultural issues are perceived and lived more on a “neighbourhood” level than on a city level.
The new middle class of the medium enterprise understands the need of metropolitan-scale infrastructures; at the same time it is both strongly bound to ancient idealized  - and therefore sterile- roots and an indefinite globalized future. The consequence is having difficulties in finding a synthesis between the two trends, also because of a lack of the right cultural tools (especially a metropolitan newspaper) able to express this new phase.
Sometimes even the intellectual elite itself, of which the Venice area abounds, perceives this opening as a wound to its virgin lands, to its traditions and to its ancient rural culture. These intellectuals rightly denounce the horrors produced by the widespread urban development, but they fail, together with the common conscience, to understand the positive transformation that is under way, and the potentials of the new development phase that has started ten years ago. The same potentials that may aim at an ethical and aesthethic recovery of the territory.
How can we fill these vacuums? We should recover our memory and roots, but live them inside new scenarios.

Why the Venice area should be the new European capital of culture
Big events, despite the many problems arising in the preparatory phases, have by now become the principal driving forces of the processes under way, both on an infrastructural level and on a cultural level. The Venice area, during the next ten years, may get ready to gradually become the European Capital of culture of 2019, also starting from the scheme proposed in the first edition of the Festival of the City-Enterprise. It is entitled to that, whether it likes it or not, because it will become more and more a metropolitan area, and will be, even more than today, a territory rich in excellent resources. Besides, it has an incomparable cultural inheritance: from The Venice Biennale to the Verona Arena, continuing with the Mart Museum in Rovereto, the treasures of Palladio, the Scrovegni Chapel and the Central European traditions.
Its enterprises are world leaders in the creation of styles and trends and at the same time the cultural life is wide-spread.
It has to work in order to become a European Capital of culture because our enterprises, to compete in the global markets, need a territory capable of attracting talented persons, supplying first-rate education and professional qualifications.
Moreover this could be a good occasion to organize international-level railway, road, harbour, and airport infrastructures.

The theme of the third edition of the Festival of the city-enterprise: Culture enriches us.
The match between enterprise and culture has been a key factor throughout these years, in the passage from subtraders of the main European producers to leaders of the new global economy. The Venice area, which became rich in the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s thanks to its hard work, today is still rich and can be competitive thanks to the match ‘enterprise-culture’.
But there’s more to that. The rising attention for the cultural life has determined the development of a touristic flow that is bringing richness to the territory more and more. The Venice area has attracted important foreign investors (like in the case of Palazzo Grassi), invested in a museum of contemporary art (Mart museum), has been the first to organize big exhibitions in a peripheral city like Treviso, invests in nationally famous festivals (Trento for economics, Vicenza for the Bible, Gorizia for history, Pordenone for literature) and detains two of the principal cultural events of the world: the Venice Biennale and the lyrical season of Verona.
Therefore it’s clear that the relationship between culture and territory creates new professional roles and new qualified jobs.
The Festival, in its third edition, will be an occasion to rethink about our past and our future, listening to all the experiences that may contribute, with a critical attitude, to build a new common conscience of a territory which may have lost its sense and ancient values.

The Festival’s formula
The Festival of the city-enterprise will try, in this third edition, to follow the path started three years ago. A network event that takes place in some cities-enterprise which constitute the symbol of the transformation of the Venice area’s economic and social fabric, and that will connect them to Verona, Venice and Trieste, symbols of the three region’s cultural life in turn, where some key events will take place.
A Festival promoting , through the cultural element intended in its widest meaning, the cities and the enterprises, increasing the value of the cultural production in every sphere of the economic and cultural life. A Festival that will encourage, at the same time, a reflection over the future development of this area of the country.
A Festival where the protagonists will be trade associations, enterprises, foundations, cultural associations, universities, research centres, local, national and international institutions. Every one of these subjects will be the protagonist of the Festival with its own event, which, along with the provisions set by the Scientific Committee, will integrate the scheduled events.
A Festival hosting important national and international guests, who shall contribute, with their thoughts and artistic performances, to build and face the entrepreneurial and cultural development projects of the many “neighbourhoods-enterprise” involved.
A Festival which will emphasize the value of the whole territory and of its protagonists, who want to give their contribution to the development of the country and to tell their stories to a national audience.