WTI Magazine #48    2014 November, 26
Author : Paco Simone      Translation by:

What kind of beauty will save Italy (and the world, of course)? It is well known that Italy holds an immense cultural heritage, treasure of the world. As the Country with the largest number of UNESCO World Heritage Sites, we can say that Italy hosts Beauty, enjoyed and rediscovered for centuries, to the present day.

That's not the beauty mentioned in the title, however. This article begins by paraphrasing Dostoevskij ("красота спасет мир", "Beauty will save the world"). And it is interesting that the word "Mir", in Russian, has the double meaning of "world" and "peace": harmony between people correspond to humanity itself. The silent revolution irreversibly triggered by a media such as Internet allows us today to find out and learn more - as never before - our neighbours, people of other Nations and, no doubt, ourselves.

To understand is to accept diversity and approach it. To understand means feeling commons emotions and aspirations. And the common feeling is sharing and participation: if there is a media that opened immediate and instinctive interactions involving people far away, this is certainly the Internet, in all its expressions. Crowdsourcing and crowdfunding are just that: creating or sharing toward a common goal, treasuring each other's differences to be stronger together in the development of ideas. United we stand. The literal translation of Dostoevskij's anastrophe, in fact, is: "The world will save beauty".

That's the purpose of For Italy (www.foritaly.org), the one and only crowdfunding platform for the Italian culture, heritage of the whole world. And that's the Great Beauty: people from all over the world who concretely contribute to preserve a compound cultural inheritance (made of art, landscape, food, style, fashion and design) that belongs to all human kind.

As a crowdfunding process, every person can take part to crowdfunding campaigns and make change possible: beauty is very fragile, it needs continuous attention, special and passionate care. Generosity of the people in the world is ever compensated: even if there's no better reward than a restored gene of the Culture, perks and personal gratifications are however provided. One of the most significant is the opportunity to carve your name in history, recording it forever on plaques close to works of art, as well as to receive exclusive products made in Italy.

The current campaign is dedicated to the Duomo di Milano, a symbol of art universally recognized. As rightly said by Beppe Severgnini, Italian writer and journalist, "the beauty of the Duomo is not Milanese, or Italian, or European. It's human. It belongs to all of us, wherever we are".

We do believe in an ambitious project that will return to the world our Italian cultural heritage, today worn out by neglect and decay or not recovered because of the economic crisis.

All that is now possible. All that is sharing of values, it is an act of love. For Italy and for all humanity.