NINE MERCHANTS AT THE FAIR 2006

Since 2021 I have handled communication, graphic design and at times photography for Festival Viator, the music festival of the pilgrim routes. It began with an artistic director who went round the same circuit every year to keep his festival alive. A drive to Terlizzi, an application to the Italian Ministry of Culture, a phone call at midnight. Four more editions since then, and four regions.

He’d come to ask for ‘a helping hand’

February 2021. Giovannangelo de Gennaro walks into Editrice L'Immagine and asks for a contribution to Festival Viator, then in its seventh edition. I know him well. He is a wayfaring musician and he directs the festival with Michele Lobaccaro of Radiodervish. I heard him out and told him what I had been thinking for a while. Gianni, you cannot go round every year begging from private companies and public bodies. Enough. Raise the bar and dream bigger.

From Terlizzi to the Ministry

Dreaming big, though, is done with your feet on the ground. I took him to Terlizzi, to Oronzo Amorosini, a cultural project designer. Oronzo built the dossier and submitted it to the Italian Ministry of Culture for FUS performing arts funding. Then months of silence, the administrative kind that makes you think you have wasted your own time and a friend's as well.

In the middle of summer, at midnight, Oronzo called. The Ministry had approved it. Not for one year, for three.

Festival Viator, music and pilgrim routes across four regions

Viator began in 2015 from an idea by de Gennaro and Lobaccaro and it holds together music and the world of the pilgrim routes, the old medieval ways walked again today by people looking for a slower kind of travel. Minds, hearts and bodies on the Via Francigena of the south.

From October to December it runs across Apulia, Basilicata, Molise and Lombardy. Its stages have hosted Vinicio Capossela in Molfetta Cathedral, Antonella Ruggiero, Alice and Juri Camisasca. In February 2023 the ninth edition was presented at BIT in Milan, the International Tourism Exchange. A festival of sacred music and walking routes had become a tourism product. That is what I had in mind when I said enough.

La Cassetta degli Attrezzi

A concrete vision worth sharing, a festival living on yearly contributions is not a festival, it is a fundraiser with music inside

When someone asks you for one thing, check whether the problem is another one, the contribution solved a single edition, the Ministry funding solved three

Putting in touch people who do not know each other, an artistic director from Molfetta and a cultural project designer from Terlizzi who would never have crossed paths

What I learned

That day I was asked for a cheque. I gave an address in Terlizzi and a sentence put badly. Dreaming big on its own is not enough, what Viator needed was not my enthusiasm but a dossier filled in properly. The cheque would have gone into a single edition. The address in Terlizzi has lasted since 2021.

At the same BIT in 2023 I launched Pugliautentica.it with fourteen municipalities and a marching band in the aisles. The bass drum, though, was at risk of not arriving.

From the neighbourhood to the region. How a self-funded cultural association went from slogans about litter to Holy Week in Apulia.

Commercial work isn't enough to hold the relationships that matter

An editorial company working on its own territory eventually notices one thing. Commercial work isn't enough to hold the relationships that matter. In 2003 I founded the Associazione Culturale Opera as an offshoot of Editrice L'Immagine in Molfetta, where I have been co-owner since 1980. An independent vehicle to do cultural work without asking any client for permission.

Slogans no town hall would ever sign

I started from the ground, from the street. A self-funded civic education campaign, with lines no public office would put its name to. "Don't be the piece of trash on the street." "Taste of salt, or taste of swine?" for the people who dump their waste on the beach. At nine one morning the Mayor and Senator of Molfetta called me to have them covered up. I didn't cover them. They stayed up to the end, and the anger burned itself out. I even opened an email contest, with citizens writing the slogans for the next round of posters.

From the neighbourhood to the region

From there Opera widened its view. Exhibitions in the city's spaces, talks on local themes, and then the project that changed the scale: Holy Week in Apulia. I designed it and promoted it through Opera to hold the region's Easter rites together inside a single story. No longer Molfetta, but Apulia.

When the tool teaches the trade

Today the association is no longer active. It was absorbed into the ordinary editorial work of Editrice L'Immagine, which by then had learned to run cultural projects on its own. Holy Week in Apulia followed the same course, folded back into the parent company. Opera was born as a tool. Once the tool had taught the trade, the company no longer needed it.

One uncomfortable line beats a hundred press releases

When a phone call comes at nine in the morning with an official shouting down the line, the message has landed where it was meant to. It isn't a victory. It's a fact. Worth keeping in mind before writing the next poster.

Our address, for years, was "the fourth shed". Not a name, a number in a row. In 2005 I founded a magazine to do territorial marketing where everyone saw only sheds.

Two years of work for an industrial area no one was telling. A bilingual magazine, self-financed, sent to Italian and European chambers of commerce.

From the fourth shed to "let's try to tell our story"

When we settled in the industrial area, in 1993, our logistic reference was "the fourth shed". Not a name, not a recognisable sign, a number in a row. Years later I realised that this wasn't only a matter of signage. It was everyone's condition.

Dozens of businesses working every day, producing revenue, giving jobs, and to the city of Molfetta they were little more than a stain on the map. The invisibility wasn't an accident. It was structural, there existed no territorial marketing tool built to tell what happened inside there.

The idea, doing territorial marketing where everyone saw only sheds

In 2005 I founded ZAPP IMPRESA. A bimonthly bilingual magazine, dedicated to the Molfetta industrial area, self-financed through the sale of advertising space and company reports. I sent it free to Italian and European chambers of commerce. I sold it at the newsstand. Whoever bought advertising in ZAPP IMPRESA wasn't buying space in a magazine. They were saying they existed. It wasn't a company magazine for internal use.

It was a concrete attempt to do territorial marketing in a place where, until then, the territory was only sheds and fences. Each issue held interviews with the entrepreneurs, columns run by business professionals for training, spaces open to art and to the city's other newspapers. I organised themed conferences. It wasn't only a magazine, it was a programme.

La Cassetta degli Attrezzi

A concrete vision to share. Give a name and a face to an industrial area that had none
Self-financing as a rule. Everything from advertising space and company reports
Targeted distribution. Italian and European chambers of commerce, and the newsstand
Each issue a concrete story. A company, a problem, an institutional counterpart who found himself obliged to answer
I handled graphics, layout and communication for the magazine

In 2006 I suspended it

I didn't close it. I suspended it. In 2007 the Holy Week in Molfetta project started, the first tourism promotion campaign for Molfetta's Easter rites, and I could no longer manage everything, the magazine, the clients I followed personally, the new project.

I had to give something up. ZAPP IMPRESA gave way. Not because it wasn't working. Because at that moment something else was starting, and I wasn't willing to do it halfway. Two years were enough to prove that the industrial area had stories to tell and an audience willing to listen to them. That was no small thing.

The first tourism promotion plan for Molfetta's Easter rites, 2007. Eight companies and one confraternity, no public funding. By Gaetano Armenio.

"Gaetano, I want a good poster." I had not even prepared the layout. What I put on the table were two typewritten pages, a thirty thousand euro plan. The confraternity could cover a small part of it, the rest I found myself.

The request

One day the doctor Franco Stanzione, prior of the Confraternita della Morte, and the photographer Antonio D'Agostino walk into my office. The request is clear. "Gaetano, I want a beautiful poster for Holy Week in Molfetta." A few days pass. We meet again. They expect a layout. I lay two typewritten sheets on the table, a tourism promotion project for Molfetta's Holy Week, worth thirty thousand euro. The prior tells me straight away, with the honesty I always recognised in him, that the Confraternita can only contribute a small share. I already knew. But I had seen that potential, and I didn't want to leave it there.

A cultural project for a brotherhood, without public funds

The project could exist only if the local businesses held it up. I brought in eight of them, Remec, Cattolica Popolare, the Goccia di Sole olive oil mill, Top Service, Garden Hotel, Editrice L'Immagine, Rifindecor, ConfSud. Each put in a share. Together with the Confraternita's, it was enough. No public money, the town council had other things on its mind. It was, in fact, one of the first cases where I saw that turning a religious rite into a tourism offer doesn't necessarily need a public grant. It needs people who believe in their territory.

Where I took it

A space at BIT in Milan to present Molfetta and its rites to Italian and foreign operators. A stand at Bari-Palese Airport for two months. An info point at the Confraternita during the days of Holy Week. A bilingual catalogue and portal. Guided tours during the Easter period, along a route built around the city.

La Cassetta degli Attrezzi

A concrete vision to share. A religious rite is already a tourism offer, you just have to treat it as one
Deliver more than you were asked for. They asked me for a poster, I brought a project
Hold the project up on local businesses when there is no public funding, eight companies, one share each
Man the real flows. The stand at Bari-Palese Airport catches those arriving and those leaving
Bilingual Italian and English materials, catalogue, portal and an info point open during the days of Holy Week
I handled graphics, communication and the visual identity of the project

What I learned

The 2007 project lasted a single season. Not because it ended badly, because it became something else. The interest gathered in Milan and at Bari-Palese, and above all the question that kept coming back from visitors, "only Molfetta?", convinced me that the right scale was no longer the city, but the region. The following year the network of Holy Week in Apulia was born. I have no figures to show from that edition, at the time we didn't collect them, and it would be dishonest to invent them now. What I can say is that the interest was big enough to push a city project into becoming a regional one.

video  > https://youtu.be/-5y_m1diEjI