This year, the focus of Fondazone Symbola’s summer seminar was on the circular economy, that way of making a supply chain for the total utilisation of production that was structural in the traditional, predominantly agricultural system, with measured if not scarce resources, when hard work and distance counted in the economy.
Today we rediscover the convenience of this for the exorbitant social, environmental and economic cost assumed by waste disposal, in a production system gone mad that has believed it profitable to throw away little-used machines, products and materials to make way for the quantitative impellence of new production.

Perfectly in line with Francis’s contemporary encyclical (perhaps they agreed…), over two days some fifty operators discussed the many facets of the theme. These ranged from new materials resulting from waste processing, to the possible effects on architectural and landscape design (Mario Cucinella even dedicated a master’s degree in architecture to the subject, presented in Treia). From the potential for reorganising consumption to the new attractiveness of sober and integrated living offers, for example contact with nature.

As ideas and good practices are collected, the genius of monsier Lapalice comes to mind: this economy (as well as the sharing economy) is based on a discovery of hot water, but today it develops great innovative power. In short, it seems that it is enough to use well to make even a high quality of life sustainable, solving one of the ethical knots of our flawed civilisation.
If we understand that the quality of our lives is perceived (and therefore must be measured) by the quantity of good actually enjoyed, and not on the quantity of goods consumed, the game is up. The monomaniacal spell of ‘consumption is beautiful’ breaks down and leaves a landscape of rubble. On which the circular economy, dedicated to the waste end (as the title of the Symbola report states), will have its place.
It is not all obvious, of course, because one has to reckon with the resilience of industrial production processes, based on the economy of consumption and waste. This is where the innovation and entrepreneurship front lies: declining the term sustainability, which is far too overused, and making convincing better use of investments, both public and private. What is needed are economically balanced, strategically self-sufficient programmes that maintain territorial resources and do not drain them into productive machines with no future.

It is no coincidence that one of the seminars within the Treia meetings was entitled ‘resilience of territories’, to be contrasted with the resilience of the old (but still financially vigorous) economy of general consumption and local robbery.
In Treia, the resilience of territories turned out to be a fair but blurred frame: we know that it lies in the powerful connection between the socio-cultural structure of the inhabiting communities and the environmental and historical heritage they inhabit, but we are unable to specify the operational contours of the actions to be taken, of the subjects who must intervene. Because resilience, in this landslide phase of the old economy, cannot consist in a passive, clam-like defence, which calls for nothing but patience and tenacity. What is needed instead is the ability to jump out of the sinking ship, an enterprise to return to Ithaca after the failure of wars. Because the resilience of the territories will be told like the Odyssey: an endless adventure of innovation and modernity to regain the healthiest and most essential values and references for inhabiting this world.

Symbola, gathering together the best that is known, shows the lag of projects on this subject in Italy, neglected by the most important political and economic strategies. Interesting experiences are (re)counted in protected areas, in districts that manage to network territorial resources. What emerges is the difference in central Italy, which still has alive in its DNA the history of mediaeval municipalities and local economies founded on a style of collective and artisan enterprise, which sometimes lands on global markets, testifying (but only testifying) that it can be done so. But one also understands how many failures in the medium term, how much effort it costs to maintain these experiences beyond the initial enthusiasm, in a system that does not help local initiatives and immediately throws them into a global and purely economicist market, which bureaucratises every strategy. Above all, one hears the pains of those who clash with a system that does not reward collaboration and the common and integrated project, evaluating only sectoral efficiency and not overall, circular effectiveness for the territory.

Almost as a demonstration of this dismal historical context, the third day, which has been dedicated for the past five years to the thematic in-depth analysis of the ‘I am Culture’ report, which Symbola, with Unioncamere and others, dedicates to the numbers of the economic incidence of the private cultural sector.
From the very beginning, the face of Lina Cavalieri, immortalised in a thousand attitudes by Fornasetti in his 1960s dishes, was wonderfully chosen for the cover of the report.
This year Lina looks squintingly at a fly on her nose. This is the perfect metaphor for a precious type of investigation, which runs the risk of being stifled every day in sterile, sector-based polemics, on the statistical values of a phenomenon that should be considered above all for its qualitative effects on the entire country system.
These polemics only resonate in the rooms of the few dozen operators that deal with the economy of culture, but they risk tarnishing the broader value of Symbola’s strategy, which brings operators that deal with the recycling of used tyres or military property to take an interest in cultural industries. Every year, listening to these reports in an integrated way, the operators of the new economy (whether soft, green or circular) find themselves more aware of: ‘I am culture’.
From Treia, therefore, we take home this intriguing idea, that culture today is a strategic tool for development, but only if we realise that, for example, the officials of the Ministry of the Economy, entrusted with the ‘valorisation’ of public heritage, are cultural agents as much as and more than festival organisers, given that they can destroy or enhance the cultural value of thousands of state-owned historic buildings. Or that in the crisis, the cultural organisers who work in the third sector and have their main business in other sectors of the old economy and therefore do not appear in the official statistics survive. Or that, as one public manager told us: ‘today roles and competences count less and less, what counts is the desire to set one’s work in terms of service for a common project’.
So there we are again, men of goodwill, those who have ears to hear and heads to respond with commitment.
Of course we need to count them, even if it is very difficult. Perhaps it would be more useful for everyone to know where they are and what they are doing.
So let us say, among men of goodwill: let us move from statistics to maps, it will be easier for us to get to know each other and network.