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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

EVO oil meets the UNESCO Cuisines. 1 June 2026 · Piazza Cattedrale, Bitonto

Programme: afternoon conference plus the Olio d’Artista exhibition in the Cathedral

Read the full programme

May 20, 2026

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

The Invisibles

 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.

If you'd like to set up a time before the fair, write to me.

> www.etichettelimmagine.it

21 April 2026

They'd asked me for a poster, and ended up with a € 30,000 dream. How a poster for Holy Week in Molfetta became, in 2006, a plan to promote the processional rites, and what is left of it eighteen years later.

It was an afternoon in December 2006

Dr Franco Stanzione, then prior of the Confraternity of Death, and the photographer Antonio D’Agostino came into my office to ask me to design a poster promoting the Holy Week processions in Molfetta. "Gaetano, we want a nice poster for Holy Week."

In the photographer's studio

A few days later, I had an appointment at D'Agostino's studio in the historic centre of Molfetta. Sitting opposite me were the prior, the treasurer and the secretary of the Brotherhood. They were waiting for the poster layout to be approved. I placed a typed document on the table: a plan to promote tourism around Molfetta’s Easter rituals. Worth thirty thousand euros. I hadn’t even prepared the poster layout they’d asked me for.

There was a silence. The kind that seems to go on forever. Antonio D'Agostino shot me a sidelong glance, the sort of look that says what on earth have you done. The treasurer and the secretary didn’t say a word. The prior turned bright red and said to me, ‘But we don’t have thirty thousand euros.’ I asked him how much the Brotherhood could contribute. He replied: three thousand. "Right. I'll sort out the rest." At that point, their expressions changed once again. The first shock had been the design in place of the poster. The second was realising that I was serious.

I took a gamble by trying to raise the bar and focusing on the emotional aspect of the project; I wanted to offer a ‘dream’, a vision: it was a huge professional and personal challenge for me too, and it turned out to be an unforgettable experience. It was a fraternal environment that I was unfamiliar with, but by experiencing it from the inside, I came to appreciate the great human qualities of those who are part of it.

What this article doesn’t cover

How I knocked on the doors of eight local companies and why all eight said yes. How we took Molfetta to the BIT in Milan and why we had a stand at Bari-Palese Airport for a full two months. The entire toolkit, including the items I have and those I honestly don’t have, lI’ve compiled it all in the project sheet along with a substantial photo gallery. And there’s one more thing I’m keeping to myself. After Easter, at the BIT and in Bari-Palese, a certain question started to come up again. Same question. Different people, different regions. At first, I didn’t answer properly. Then I realised he was scrapping the 2007 project and building a new, much bigger one.

The following year, Molfetta would no longer be enough.  The eight companies that said yes, what really happened in Milan and Bari-Palese, and how a city-wide project became a regional project.

27 March 2026

Holy Week in Apulia: from the Gargano to the Salento, how I have built up a network of twenty-two municipalities since 2008 to jointly promote the Easter celebrations.

"Who are you?"

When a question at a trade fair is worth more than a business plan At the Apulia Region’s stand during a trade fair, a manager came up to me. She looked at me, somewhat puzzled: “Who are you?” A fair question. Standing before her was someone with no official role, no party membership, and no regional office to back them up. However, he had managed to persuade twenty-two municipalities in Apulia to pay a registration fee for a joint project to promote Holy Week rituals. 

I thought about it for a moment. Then I smiled.

From ‘just Molfetta’ to the whole of Apulia

From the BIT in Milan to the Molfetta information point, and in the aisles of trade fairs, the question was always the same: "It's lovely… but is it just Molfetta? Isn't there anything else in Apulia?" Those who had experienced the processions in the dark, the drums, and the silence that weighs like a stone, wanted more. And that ‘more’ did exist. From the Gargano to Salento, every town had its own Easter traditions, its own processions, and its own communities that came together every year. But no one told their stories together. Each village went its own way, like islands in an uncharted archipelago.

In 2008, I started making phone calls.

Initial sign-ups: ten local councils. Then word of mouth and meetings. Ten became twenty-two. A regional network has been established, organised into themed routes: Gargano and Daunia, Imperial Apulia, Bari and the Trulli Coast, Salento, and Magna Graecia. Councillor Guglielmo Minervini puts me in touch with Massimo Ostillio, the councillor for tourism. They like the idea. The project is taking on a regional dimension.

The work that goes unseen

Behind every procession lies the work of skilled craftsmen. Research, analysis and a set of quality standards to ensure a warm welcome and basic services. Then there are the tools: a bilingual guide, a website, a presence at trade fairs, and a stand at Bari Airport to engage with arriving and departing passengers. The aim was clear: to spread tourism throughout the year. To use Holy Week in Apulia as a catalyst for travel, rather than the usual summer beach season. Roots instead of a parasol. An opportunity to discover the region’s beauty through its landscapes, art and food and wine.

The best ideas don’t come from the office

They come from listening to tourists and travellers who ask questions and seek ‘authenticity’. That question – "But only Molfetta?" – was already the answer. We just had to take it seriously. And when a manager asks you, "Who are you, anyway?", perhaps that’s a sign that the invisible work has started to show itself.