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A virtual coffee with Riccardo Fuochi, an illustrious protagonist of national and international luxury logistics.

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We stopped in Milan, this time to talk about another fundamental theme for recovery, always drinking a virtual coffee to consume while we talk with another illustrious guest. We wanted to reserve a space of conversation on one of the fundamental clusters of Italian economic life: culture and art, undisputed symbols of a Country, ours, which boasts an absolute primacy for history, for historical artifacts, for illustrious undisputed artists and geniuses that the whole world envies us. Let’s not exaggerate if we say that more than half of the artworks exhibited in museums around the world are attributed to Italian artists.

Culture, in our country system, accounts for about 6% of GDP. The sector is certainly not a discovery, it is an extraordinary driving force for the other production sectors connected to it and above all it is one of the key factors in attracting tourists from all corners of the world.

Internationally, Italy is recognized as a leader and the movement of foreign tourists who choose to enjoy our artistic assets every year, to visit our cities of art, our places of culture, is the incontrovertible proof of this. Our added value doesn’t stop there. We are a real open-air museum, a natural scenario capable of catapulting the visitor into every historical era. We could define Italy as a “Special Cultural Zone” which lacks an official recognition that takes into account the enormous potential of the system capable of “boosting” the economic system, combining tax exemption efficiency and the artistic heritage supplied. Where, if not in our beautiful Italy, we reiterate in all respects definable as a special cultural area, it is possible to draw from the culture, from the history of the inherited artistic heritage, from the breathtaking landscapes, from the food and wine culture of the UNESCO heritage, direct and induced economic advantages with efficient taxation and deburocratization policies? We launch a provocation that we hope will be caught by those who work in the cultural system. In addition, to stimulate the interest of potential investors … Montecarlo, Luxembourg, Geneva, Singapore, Dubai. What do these cities have in common? All have free zones for works of art that allow the artistic heritage of collectors and investors from all over the world to be guarded, transferred, protected and preserved in a protected atmosphere. Not only. Within these free zones it is possible to buy works of art and valuable goods without the application of customs duties and indirect taxes. Of course, it is necessary that these “special areas” operate in the transparency of the operations guaranteeing all parties and, above all, legality. It would also allow to further increase the professionalism of the artistic evaluation services, the recovery of artistic assets located in numerous caveau (usually managed by banks) and concentrate them in a single place that guarantees not only confidentiality but also a set of logistic services that are essential for the conservation over time and space of the works kept. Moreover, the 2018/843 directive on anti-money laundering requires strict checks on the actual beneficiaries of the asset in order to avoid twisted maneuvers that, through fictitious attribution systems, conceal sinister illegal operations. The combination of free zones, including Special Economic Zones, and logistics in this case becomes the efficient solution capable of protecting and protecting artistic and valuable goods without risk to the owner and without the value of the asset itself being reduced due to damage or transport trauma, but there are also enormous advantages for the entire museum circuit. We welcome our virtual coffee to another exceptional guest known all over the world. Today Riccardo Fuochi is with us, who is an important point of reference in the logistics supply chain sector, positioned on the luxury brand segment, which is essential in the evaluation of artistic works, in their storage and in their handling.

RALIAN: Dr. Fuochi, you are an institution in the logistics sector, in particular among many things, you are president of OLG international sarl based in Chiasso and president of the International Propeller Club of Milan. What does your business do and what does the activity of the Propeller Club consist of?

Dott. Fuochi: OLG International is an international company born after having acquired a long experience in the fashion logistics sector for the main luxury brands. Its main office is in Chiasso, where there is a logistics center for works of art, fine wines and precious objects with a development also overseas in Hong Kong. We have developed niche know-how for lifestyle logistics. We continue to offer our services to numerous fashion brands, so we take care of following interior design, visual merchandising and events projects, and we have developed a structure capable of offering a series of services related to the world of artworks and precious objects . We follow galleries, collectors, artists and auction houses trying not only to offer purely logistic transport and storage services, but following them in all their packaging needs, customs and ministerial issues, art handling, condition reports, we offer the possibility to restore the works at our facility, photograph them, show them to experts, exhibit them and archive them in blockchain. The Propeller is a cultural association that promotes the meeting and relationships between people who gravitate to the world of shipping, transport and logistics. It favors training and technical and cultural updating among all those belonging to the economic and professional categories that gravitate to the world of shipping, transport and logistics, organizing meetings, conferences, events, missions also at an international level. Among the most important events I would like to mention the Shipping Weeks in Genoa and Naples and the Shipping Meets Industry in Milan.

Ralian: Culture is the cradle of innovation. Through culture we stimulate creativity and thanks to it we give life to innovation. In your opinion, is culture perceived in our country as a real cluster or do we still have an obsolete vision of its multiplicative potential on the economic system?
Dr. Fuochi: The current emergency has certainly been positive in this respect, it has accelerated innovative and digital development in all sectors, including the cultural one. Certainly culture is perceived as a cluster in its own right, but an evolution is also necessary in this sector to allow the dissemination and creation of international projects. Museums are creating beautiful innovative and digital projects, as well as private galleries. The range of action is decidedly wide, but somewhere you have to start.

Ralian: Creativity and art have always been the highest form of beauty, of human expression. Very often immortal masterpieces have been inspired by human and social hardships, by situations of suffering in the body and spirit, sometimes they have been the denunciation of an injustice, the awareness of a necessary turnaround that has inspired whole epochs of our humanity. It is therefore the highest expression of resilience. In this complicated period in which an unprecedented economic depression is feared, how can art help us and how can it be made accessible to everyone, so as to spread its beneficial and resilient message?
Dr. Fuochi: By educating people to appreciate art in all its expressions, visual arts, performing arts, theater, cinema, music, dance by combining various forms within paths, events, manifestations and combining them with local traditions, thus involving the whole population . All this also aimed at improving living conditions, respecting the environment and culture of the individual territories.

Ralian: What does Italy need to ensure that the art sector, of which our country is the natural cradle for authors, finds, history, landscape beauty, find a leading role in the economic system?
Dr. Fuochi: “culture is the only good of humanity which, divided among all, instead of decreasing becomes greater.” [Cit. Hans Georg Gadamer]
Enhancement. Italy is the country with the largest concentration of artistic and cultural heritage in the world, but not only the historical and past one that attracts tourists from all over the world every year, but also the contemporary one. There are many young people who train every year in our academies to improve their artistic expression and break the canonical schemes and be appreciated by those who observe their works. There are certainly many interesting initiatives, but the enhancement and importance of our territory rich in villages, monuments and historic centers could be further improved and redeveloped and recovered. There is no corner of our country from which beauty, history and culture do not emerge. This immense heritage must be recovered with economic and fiscal measures aimed at attracting investments, including from private individuals, to encourage cultural, artistic and commercial activities, creating areas that we could define as real “special cultural zones”, paraphrasing the concept of SEZs.

Ralian: What do you think are 5 artworks that can help us to understanding that the greatest beauty can come from the ugliest and most complicated things to deal with?
Dr. Fuochi: There are many artworks that can express these feelings. It is inherent in the soul of the artist to be inspired by moments of difficulty to express values ​​of hope and beauty. I could represent some great masterpieces such as:
1. the flagellation of Christ by Piero della Francesca, describes the Christian ignavia in the face of the Turkish advance preceding the fall of Constantinople. The realization will lead to the union of papacy and empire and to the battle of Lepanto.
2. the deposition of Christ by Raffaello, Atalanta rejected his son Grifonetto, who through insane jealousy had participated in the massacre of the red wedding of the Baglioni of Perugia. The repression led him to death and his mother mourned him and made Raphael commemorate him representing him as a divine young man, who bears the feet of the dead Christ … maternal love …
3. massacre of the innocent, by Rubens, the reference to the wars of religions that tormented Antwerp and Flanders, with thousands of innocent civilians killed, is expressed as a beastly madness in Rubens’ masterpiece, whose commitment to peace has always been very vivid
4. Giuditta and Holoferne of Caravaggio The Jewish widow Giuditta beheads the Babylonian general Holoferne: there are many interpretations, but it is certain that reluctant Giuditta performs the will of God for the liberation of her people, which can also be read as a victory of purity, represented by the young and beautiful heroine, on brute force.
5. Guernica of Picasso 1937 German bombing of the Spanish city that upsets French public opinion and leads Picasso to express his disdain in the masterpiece exhibited immediately in Paris at the universal exhibition, helping to awaken free souls and support the indomitable spirit that resisted the subsequent defeat and occupation

Ralian: You deal with logistics. How do you combine this sector with that of culture, art and what do you think are the best practices to consider for an optimization of the entire reference cluster?
Dr. Fuochi: Have you ever wondered how works arrive in museums, how do loans between countries take place for exhibitions? Rather, what happens from the moment a collector buys a work in a gallery and ends up in our house? Here is the link between the logistics sector and the art sector. We take care of this. First of all to create a relationship of trust with the interlocutor – gallery / collector / personal assistant / banks / art advisor / artists – and to be able to assist him in all operations, without leaving him any worries, but rather reassuring him and working in the utmost confidentiality. We take care of training people in the best possible way so that they are able to handle the works of art and assist customers: we start with a documentary check to verify that everything is in order or to request what is necessary, we create the suitable packaging for transport, we draw up a condition report when we collect and when we deliver the work, we take out insurance, we evaluate the means to be used and the number of people necessary for transport, we employ a team of art handlers who can take care of the installation. In short, we follow all the aspects that allow us to transfer the works with the utmost attention from one place to another.

 


We thank Dr. Fuochi for sharing his expertise with us and for allowing us to draw many ideas for a relaunch of the culture sector, as expressed at the beginning of the article.
We are preparing for another virtual coffee and we will see you soon.

 

RALIAN Research & Consultancy srl

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Can the culture represent a driving force of economic development for the territory?

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Can the culture represent a driving force of economic development for the territory?
RALIAN Research & Consultancy srl CEO, Valentina Di Milla, gave her answer in the seminar addressed to students of the three-year period of Marketing and Tourism of the “Fermi” Technical-Economic Institute of Gaeta (Italy).
The speech has been focused on the theme of cultural and creative enterprise, a new way of doing economy on a global level, which provides for the humanization of production processes, creativity as the beating heart of the company, cultural promotion at the center of interest entrepreneurial.
Recognized by the European Union as an essential factor for the economic and social growth of the entire European territory, participating in the EU Gross Domestic Product for approximately 3%, cultural enterprises are the new challenge in an innovative economic context.
The cultural enterprise represents a network of human values ​​placed at the center of an economic project to spread territorial, cultural, artistic, technological, creative and, therefore, professional beauty.
It follows that the creative and cultural industry is a natural added value for any other company in the industrial sector.
The video of the interview is available at the minute 2.32 on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrztDvlEHQE

Cultural and creative enterprise

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A few decades ago, investing in a cultural and creative enterprise was certainly the most visionary decision that could be taken. It was at the center of an ardent debate that contrasted the political world with the scientific world. The sector of the cultural industry was considered in a negative way: an industry that has neither real inputs nor as many tangible outputs, it is certainly an industry that does not produce. In reality, the fruit of human intellect, of its imagination and of its particular inspiration is really a production in the economic sense. It will be precisely the English political world, through the words of Tony Blair, then British Prime Minister, to recognize the economic value of the creative industry, attributing to it the ability to create wealth and work through the use of intellectual property. In addition to this recognition, another direct consequence of the first was born: the extraordinary creative and innovative scope inherent in the cultural sector enterprises to stimulate a virtuous spiral of growth in the economic and social fields. In Italy, at the end of 2007, the President of the Republic Giorgio Napolitano, in his speech at the end of the year, stated that “a strength of our ountry is the culture of creativity, which must make the potential of our businesses and of our work”. It is undeniable that creativity favors the growth of the economy and puts companies in a position of competitive advantage. Hence the exaltation of the economic and social significance of a new way of doing economy which, after more than a decade from these affirmations, manifests itself in all its truth: human value, people, their formation and the development of their knowledge, constitute the real added value of a company.

Our conclusion is based on the observation of the internal and managerial dynamics of a cultural / creative company. In fact, in this industrial context personal skills and technical knowledge are not enough. The conditio sine qua non which is the basis for the success and the innovative capacity of a cultural enterprise is inexorably the environment within which it operates, so as to encourage its creative vision and, at the same time, an economy that seriously wants to invest in it. It is a complex process that bases its very survival on a necessary and sufficient condition, identifiable with the coexistence and perfect collaboration of indispensable and irreplaceable assets as unique, such as ideas, abilities, preparation, expertise and talent , with technological innovation and culture. It is precisely culture that is the productive factor capable of triggering the entire process of cultural and creative production through which we can develop new products.

Furthermore, the analysis of a cultural enterprise must be examined for each type of activity that can potentially be delivered. If we observe it from an artistic production point of view, the creative potential is expressed in all its grandeur through the conception and realization of a quid never realized before, a unique and authentic product, the result of imagination, style and inspiration. The economic repercussions are its immediate consequence and close as in a perfect circle in which it is no longer possible to understand its beginning and its end, precisely because that innovation establishes an uninterrupted and dynamic cycle that finds its economic justification in the more than perfect allocation of unique intangible assets, including artistic inspiration, technological innovations and new economic scenarios, with the combination of human, social, institutional and cultural factors. It follows that creativity is not “only” the inspiration that underlies innovation, but is one of the main and indispensable factors that contribute to its development. In fact creative ideas are indispensable both in the initial phase and throughout its production process. The economic consistency of the project will be born from them, starting from its creation, up to the distribution of the new output (product, service and / or process) that maximizes the utility of the final consumer bringing the greatest benefit through his purchase. This virtuous process will produce long-term effects.

The European Union attaches great importance to the cultural sector and through Article 167 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) sanctions its discipline, defining its principles and the current framework through substantive contents and decision-making procedures.

It is not a coincidence, in fact, that in the same preamble to the Treaty on European Union (TEU) is expressed the precise desire to be inspired by “the cultural, religious and humanist inheritance of Europe” through a concrete commitment to respect “its rich cultural and linguistic diversity, and shall ensure that Europe’s cultural heritage is safeguarded and enhanced. (Article 3 of the TEU). These inspiring principles allow the introduction of an important innovation in the decision-making procedures within the Council. In particular, decisions relating to cultural spheres (mainly with regard to the format and scope of funding programs) do not required to vote unanimously, as in the past, but are considered adopted through the expression of qualified majority voting. The ratio is to be found in the attempt to promote a complete development of the cultures of the Member States, while respecting individual national and regional differences, in order to enhance their common cultural heritage.

The protection of culture is also accepted in the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union. In particular, article 13 states “the arts and scientific research are free” and article 22 states that “the Union respects cultural, religious and linguistic diversity”.

Therefore it is not risky to conclude that, for the European Union, the cultural sector is one of the privileged instruments capable of implementing the highest objectives of prosperity, solidarity, security and internationalization. The latter in particular cannot be carried out outside a process of recognition and contemporary protection of cultural diversity and intercultural dialogue. Culture, from the point of view of the Community legislator, is to be understood as a true accelerator of creativity and international relations.

The “Creative Europe” framework program dedicates € 1.46 billion to the cultural and creative sector for the period 2014 to 2020. It is structured in the Culture Sub-program and in the MEDIA Sub-Program and in a “cross-sectoral” section that acts through a guarantee fund designed for two different purposes: to facilitate access to credit for micro, small and medium-sized enterprises in the sector; to allow a more precise and equitable assessment of risks in financial intermediation.  This helps building  an inclusive and far-sighted entrepreneurial and financial ecosystem, which enhances all the enormous potential of the sector and, at the same time, reassures public and / or private investors of the reliability and economic capacity of the cultural and creative sector.

It should be noted that the amount of budget available to the cultural sector will be defined in this month of December. If on the one hand, rumors speak of an increase in the sum made available to the cultural and creative sector, bringing it to a doubling of that expected in the previous period. However, there are also many concerns about deep cuts in the sector, as feared by Sabine Verheyen, president of the EU CULT Commission.

The arguments put forward so far would remain sterile words if they were not supported, as they are, by numbers and statistics. In particular, according to the most recent Eurostat periodical publication, the cultural and creative sector as a driver of economic growth:

– contributes more than 2% to the European Gross Domestic Product;

– it is an important employment source with more than 8.7 million jobs to its credit, for a value equal to 3.8% of total employment. The confirmation of what has been stated comes from highly innovative companies, which possess an important economic potential and the possibility, through alternative and highly innovative financing channels (crowfunding, smart finance, business angels), to penetrate the market in a disruptive way generating other occupation, as well as stimulating foreign trade.

– is a dynamic and stimulating sector able to attract unique talents and “transilient” minds. A meltin ‘pop of diversity and uniqueness that stimulates, fascinates, attracts, innovates, creates, realizes, reproduces, embellishes, enchants, monetizes, teaches, elevates. A varied constellation of professionalism that ranges from the “creative, artistic and entertainment” arts, to “libraries, archives, museums and other cultural activities”, as well as from the sector of production and programming of audiovisual, radio, cinema, record activities, to sector of specialized design activities.

Welcome to a new era, that one in which doing business is a question of culture.

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