Oscar Farinetti: out of the tunnel, we call the best Italians to tell the story of the best Italy

“As soon as we get out of the tunnel, we’ll immediately have to do a powerful and extraordinary worldwide marketing operation to relaunch our country. And as today we use Fiorello, in my opinion very intelligently, to convince the Italians to stay at home and respect the rules, then we will have to do the same with Andrea Bocelli, Valentino Rossi, Samantha Cristoforetti, Riccardo Muti or Renzo Piano, that is, with the most famous and esteemed Italians to convince and go and tell the citizens of the world to come to Italy, that there is no more virus, that we are always the cleanest country, from restaurants to hotels, and that the Colosseum, Venice, Florence, the Langhe, and the vineyards are always there. And, to do this, we will have to invest a lot of money, to immediately relaunch tourism and export”. Oscar Farinetti, the Italian entrepreneur and owner of Eataly, wine producer, and symbol of the “visionary optimism” that is part of the history of Italy told WineNews about the serious Coronavirus emergency that is devastating the country and all, really all, its productive, economic and social sectors, including wine, food and their distribution.
Farinetti who, at this moment, “would do what a family does, who is in trouble, but has savings: I would go and get them and spend them to get out. Italians have 4,117 billion euros in savings. We are not a poor country, but very rich, perhaps the richest in the world, but we never think about this, we only talk about public debt. We must, instead, do as a family does, put our hands in our pockets: we apply, immediately, that 1% on Italian savings to have 41 billion euros. I do not believe that any Italian in the face of such an emergency would refuse, but we must impose it and do so by law. Let us call it by its real name, which always looks ugly but is not: an asset, with which those who have 500,000 euros of savings will have to give 5,000, those who have 5,000 will have to give 50. No one will refuse. Let us immediately give 10 billion to health care to face and resolve the emergency, and 30 billion to “solar” companies so that they do not run out of cash. So that we can start up again healthy and fresh because if we impoverish the company, which is made up of workers, who are without wages, and entrepreneurs who are without money for investment, we are ruined and we will not start again.
Difficult moments, when even the approach to food is no longer the same: “there are two great dichotomous and different reactions. The great mass that, even if they have those savings in their pockets, which adds to the fear of getting sick also the fear of becoming poor and goes to buy cheap food by filling the house, and a smaller part, and this Eataly feels like our wine companies, which instead says that since I have to stay at home and no longer spend in restaurants, etc. at least I spend them on good food. We see a 3.000% increase in orders on Eataly.net, our online world, where they order sublime things, and we have a huge effort to deal with them. But it is not good to react by saving on the food and wine that are our country’s assets.
Farinetti also has a very precise date in mind: “April 25th, the Italian Liberation Day, and it would be nice if on that day we could celebrate the total liberation from the virus. That marked us and will leave us all different because we are dealing with a social model that is no longer based on group life, to which we were accustomed and in which we learned to live. Today we are doing smart working, I am at home, connected in front of my pc: we will have to take the best part, remove the many negative ones because we are human and we are 8 billion on the planet, we have to live, operate, invent in a group, learning from these days that many things can be done from home and at home, you can have a better life, not just to eat and sleep”.
“But we must also think about the other emergencies that we will have to manage in the future - adds Farinetti - starting from the environmental one, and we must be psychologically prepared to deal with it also in terms of economic business, projects, working to propose a different model of conscious consumption. In the world of wine, we have a lot of opportunities in this sense. We need to start creating products that are totally in harmony with the Earth, with water and with the air, and build sales places that are just as much so”.
But, above all, concludes the patron of Eataly, “we have to think about our Italy - he says – because, at the end of the tunnel, it will miss the proactive power it had before towards the rest of the world. And this country of ours, which is 0.20% of the land that has emerged, but which has such wonders that it is extraordinarily attractive to 99.80% of the rest of the world, will find itself in difficulty because for some time someone from that world will be able to continue to think about not coming to Italy, or about not buying Italian products anymore, or buying them less”.