13 July 2026

A Truth Said in a Low Voice.

Here's something few communication professionals will ever admit: when you're talking to the vastasi (Molfetta dialect for the local troublemakers), you have to speak their language. Polite words don't stick. Institutional campaigns like "Let's help our city" cling to a billboard the way a label clings to a wet bottle: they fall off after two days.

Once again, my city had turned into an open-air latrine. On one side, the usual Molfetta residents with little respect for public space. On the other, the local institutions, the town council and the rest, pretending not to see.

So in the summer of 2003, I said: let's try a poster campaign, on our own money. Who knows, maybe someone will mend their ways.

The Day the Phone Rang

Molfetta, 2009. The phone rang. A commanding tone: "COVER those posters!" It was the Mayor, who also happened to be a Senator, more than a little furious. Shortly after, the president of the local water utility summoned me, angry that the campaign had launched "without his knowledge." Too bad it was self-funded by Associazione Opera, and none of his business.

On the billboard, in warning-sign yellow: "Per strada non fare il pezzo di merda" ("Don't be a piece of shit out on the street"). On the next wave: "Liscio, gasato o vastaso?" ("Smooth, sparkling, or loutish?"), "Sapore di sale o sapore di maiale?" ("Taste of salt or taste of pig?"). And finally, the coup de théâtre: a contest open to the whole city, to choose the last slogan together.

Why Communication That Disturbs Works

Around the same time, dozens of Italian municipalities were spending thousands of euros on urban decorum campaigns signed by national agencies: all flawless, all forgettable. Ours cost little and was still remembered twenty years later. Not for its merits. For the irritation it caused.

It worked because it spoke the language of the street, not the language of the office. It didn't ask permission. And it called things by their name.

The scandal in the corridors of power lasted a few weeks. The conversation in the city lasted much longer.

That Phone Call, and the Other One

Today, I tell the story of the Mayor-Senator's phone call like a small medal. But the real proof that the campaign worked came from another phone: a journalist from La Repubblica called me because the slogan had reached his newsroom. The same phrase they wanted covered up in Molfetta was, outside Molfetta, worth an article.

When an institution tells you to cover something up, and a national newspaper calls to talk about it, you've usually hit the mark.

The rest of the story is in the project page.

22 June 2026

The Communication of Nave Italia: designing the visual identity of an event devoted to inclusion while getting seasick.

The phone that won't stop

Corrado has been calling me for over a month. Several times a day. Early morning, then mid-afternoon, then in the evening just when I thought I'd dodged it. Bringing Nave Italia to Molfetta was his idea, and he's anxious the way you get anxious when something big depends on too many people at once. Every call I tell him the same thing: stay calm, keep your cool. It doesn't help, I know, but it's my way of staying close to him. I'm a member of Il Popolo Granchio, the association behind the event. I can't ignore his calls. And, to be honest, I don't want to.

Fitting everyone onto a single sheet

They asked me to handle the communication for a ship. Me, who gets seasick and will never set foot on that ship. Maybe that's exactly why I tell its story well. I watch it from land, the way the crowd will watch it. Because this wasn't about announcing a festival. It was about holding together the Italian Navy, the Tender To Nave Italia Foundation, the Harbour Master's Office, the Apulia Region and nine associations that work with disability every single day. Heavy logos, hierarchies that don't tolerate mistakes, one single sheet where everything has to breathe without smothering.

I built the visual identity around the ship, not around the institutions.

The photograph of the brigantine fills the space, the logos sit where they belong without stealing the scene. Whoever arrives on Saturday understands the programme in a few seconds. Whoever wants to climb aboard on Sunday finds the times without looking for them. Because Nave Italia is no parade. It's the largest operational sailing brigantine in the world, and on board people with disabilities and fragilities learn autonomy through life at sea. A serious thing, told without pity. The hard part of my job was this: saying something delicate without making it weigh. And then, of course, absorbing the anxiety of the man who dreamed it up. Corrado called to check. I answered to reassure.

The band I wanted myself

The Banda Santa Cecilia. A ship like this doesn't arrive in the silence of some anonymous dock, it arrives welcomed. Saturday 27 June, at six in the afternoon, when the brigantine moors in the port of Molfetta, the brass will be there to tell it that it was expected. I'll be there too.

Feet on dry land, as always. Listening to the band and watching a ship I told from start to finish without ever climbing aboard.

PRACTICAL INFO

From 27 to 29 June, port of Molfetta (ba)

Project card link: /progetti/nave-italia-molfetta.html

See the photo gallery

8 June 2026

The flowers that arrived without warning

2006. Sending flowers was my job. That time I was the one receiving them.

Sending flowers was my job. To clients, for good wishes, for openings. That morning in 2006, with the fair just over, my office filled up with flowers arriving. For once I was on the other side of the counter. A few months earlier I had started going around the industrial district of Molfetta with a simple proposal: go together to the Fiera del Levante in Bari, one shared stand. Not a consortium, not a commitment for the years to come, but an experiment with a start date and an end date. One thing my partner and I settled straight away: Editrice L'Immagine would not be in the stand.

A party works better when you're not among the guests.

One by one, they said yes

The reaction was one I know by heart. "But we're different, we do different things." And they were right, because Cattolica Popolare, Globeco, Gaudio, Giesse Impianti, Grossano Arredamenti, Inottica, Molfetta Outlet, Remec and Sitec stood in nine sectors that didn't talk to each other. But a collective proposal isn't sold in an assembly, it's sold behind single doors, one desk at a time. One after another they said yes. No public tender, no public funding, each put in their own share. People who put up their own money think with a different kind of care, and that I had learned back in 1980.

A name, not an address

I called the stand NOVEMERCANTIinFIERA and handled its graphics and communication, because the visitor had to walk into a place, not into nine signs propped side by side to split the rent. You went in for one company and came out knowing nine. It worked. New contacts, good results, and everyone already savouring the next edition. In the months that followed, other companies in the area knocked to be there the next time.

The next time never came. The year after I was inside the Holy Week in Molfetta, and all the energy went, in one block, down that road. A single edition, then. But looking back now, those nine stands turned into one were already the same idea I would grow elsewhere: bringing together those who go it alone, and making a territory of them. I didn't know it then. I was already looking further ahead. For one week, though, the industrial district of Molfetta had a name at the Fiera del Levante, not an address on a map.

The flowers, that morning, remain the most concrete way I've seen of saying it.

Discover the project card

25 May 2026

«C' tand vtndaoin propr'a taech avevavn chiamà»

A line in Bitonto dialect, a meeting room and a chef who rose to his feet. Ten years on, Emanuele Natalizio brings to Bitonto one of the most important food events of 2026.

«C' tand vtndaoin propr'a taech avevavn chiamà.»

Of all the people in Bitonto, they had to call me. He had risen to his feet. Meeting room, Bitonto, 2016. Together with the then Councillor Rocco Mangini, I was coordinating one of the participatory meetings to build the city's tourist guide, VISITBITONTO: hospitality operators, restaurateurs, associations. One of those tables where everyone brings their own piece and in the end something shared is supposed to come out of it. Emanuele Natalizio, chef and patron of "Il Patriarca", had decided his piece was that one.

I chose not to answer him.

How real respect is born

In the years that followed we crossed paths several times, always within the perimeter of Apulian agri-food promotion. Each time with less distance between us. Emanuele is one of those people who don't soften their positions to look good: they tell you what they think and let you do the same. Over the years, we came to understand each other. Without ever saying so out loud.

What he built in the meantime

Today Emanuele chairs the Foglia d'Olio Association, and on 1 June he brings to Piazza Cattedrale a dinner-event built around extra virgin olive oil as cultural identity: Euro-Toques Italia, the UNESCO recognition of Italian cuisine, four Bitonto chefs signing the tasting menu, the actor and director Michele Placido as guest of honour. It isn't an event. It's a thesis. Adding weight to the evening will be Enrico Derflingher, President of Euro-Toques Italia, one of the figures behind the path that brought Italian cuisine to become UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage. In the afternoon, inside the Cathedral, the exhibition Olio d'Artista tells the relationship between oil, art and contemporary creativity.

Before the dinner, a conference on the cultural value of EVO oil and on the future of Italian cuisine as heritage of identity. Bitonto, a city always tied to Apulian olive growing, frames all of this. Not by chance. That morning in 2016 he had told me, in essence, that Bitonto deserved more. That those who work on the ground must have the courage to demand higher standards. It took him ten years. But he got there. I'll be there on 1 June. As a guest, this time.

And as a witness to a trajectory that, I have to admit, I hadn't foreseen that morning in the meeting room

May 20, 2026

The fourth warehouse. And a magazine nobody had asked for.

The Invisibles

A parallel city with no one to tell its story. In 1993, when we set up in Molfetta's industrial zone, our operational address was "the fourth warehouse." No joke. That's how people found their way around. No signs, no names: sequential numbers on wire fences. As if everything happening inside those walls was nobody else's business. And in fact, it wasn't. (And perhaps it still isn't, for many people.)

A parallel city with no one to tell its story

Molfetta's industrial zone in the early 2000s was exactly that: a parallel city. Dozens of companies, hundreds of workers, real turnover. To the Molfetta "up above", the bars, the piazzas, the conversations, little more than a blot on the map. The invisibility wasn't anyone's fault. It was simply that no tool existed to tell that story. In 2005 I decided that invisibility was a problem I could try to tackle. The idea was straightforward: a communication tool that would open a dialogue between the industrial zone and the city. That would give entrepreneurs a voice. That would help the people working there understand they were a development engine for all of Molfetta, not just a productive periphery.

ZAPP IMPRESA was born. A bimonthly bilingual magazine. Interviews with entrepreneurs, training and information columns curated by local professionals. Twelve issues over two years. Self-financed through advertising and company features. I sent it free to Italian and European chambers of commerce. I sold it at newsstands. I launched it to the city at the Fabbrica San Domenico, with Mayor Minervini in the front row. For the first time, entrepreneurs, institutions and citizens were in the same room talking about the industrial zone as if it concerned them all.

What didn't work and this is the interesting part

In 2006 I suspended it. Not closed. Suspended. In 2007 the first tourism campaign for Molfetta's Easter rites was getting off the ground, and I couldn't keep everything in hand at once. The company, the clients, the daily problems. Something had to give. ZAPP IMPRESA gave. Not because it wasn't working. Because something else was starting that felt more urgent, and I'm not built to do things halfway. It's a decision I'd make again. And one that still weighs on me sometimes — because in reality it was like watching a startup die at birth.

What remained

Two years proved one simple thing: the companies in the industrial zone had stories worth telling and an audience willing to listen. That wasn't obvious. Years later that same conviction became Molfettaexport.com : 69 companies, a multilingual portal, the same idea at its core. But that's another stop on the road. Some ideas arrive too early. That doesn't mean they were wrong.

> View the photo gallery

5 May 2026

Garlic, oil and chili pepper. Three ingredients. No frills. Get them wrong and you'll know it straight away. It's how we've worked for forty-five years.

Tuttofood Milano, 11–14 May. Stand T25, Hall 4.

For the first time, we have our own exhibition space. Not a shared corner. Not a token presence. A stand. A small thing, for those who don't know the industry. Enormous, for those who've been in it since 1980.

What the photo doesn't show

In the photo there are three of us: Leonardo Piccinni, our sales representative. Stefano Salvemini, my business partner. And me, in the middle, with the look of someone who knows this edition is different from the others. It's different because Etichette L'Immagine is now part of Tikedo Label Group: 14 production facilities across Italy, Spain and Lithuania. One of the fourteen is us. The ones from Molfetta. Whoever stops by our stand isn't just talking to the three of us — they're talking to a production network that covers almost every need in the food market.

A label is not a sticker

In food, the label is the first point of contact between a product and the person buying it. It decides whether a bottle of olive oil looks artisanal or industrial. Whether a shelf speaks or stays silent. At Tuttofood we're bringing updated sample books, new lines for the food sector, and printing technologies we didn't have until recently. But above all, we're bringing a habit: not selling catalogues. Building answers to each client's specific problems. If you work in the food sector and want to understand what the right label can do for your product, T25 is the place.

Get in touch before the fair if you'd like to schedule a meeting: [link/contact]