Culture is like jam, How to promote Italian heritage with businesses

Book presentation

"Culture is like jam.
How to promote Italian heritage with Business "

Marina Valensise (Venice, Marsilio 2016)

The author discusses with Giampietro Vecchiato, Professor of Public Relations, University of Padua

"Culture is like jam: the less you have, the more the smear."

Marina Valensise part of this slogan appeared on the walls of the Sorbonne in May '68, to illustrate one of the Italian paradox: the country with the richest heritage of the world is unable to enhance it, while others thrive on much less conspicuous fortunes.

From the title, the book has the feel of a provocation, but is the result of a concrete experience. Between 2012 and 2016, in fact, the author has conducted the Italian Cultural Institute in Paris and was able to renew its headquarters, to multiply the number of its visitors and to double its revenue compared to the state-provided.

The secret? The virtuous contamination and the powerful synergy between public and private in favor of heritage, which traces Marina Valensise proposing in these pages as a participatory model values. The difference in approach is not trivial and is in a seemingly simple concept: the ability to evolve, leaving a passive role to a more innovative function that goes beyond the simple transmission belt of knowledge as to produce culture in the name of a 'idea more general interest dynamics.

The lightness of the story, rich in anecdotes and the result of a thousand meetings with personalities in the most varied fields - from design to cuisine, from architecture to music - give luster to Italy in the world, joins the warning to return protagonists in the name culture internationally, offering a handbook of simple rules for applying this model to the daily reality of institutions and companies.

Marina Valensise directed the Italian Cultural Institute in Paris from 2012 to 2016. Since 1996 collaborates with "Il Foglio" and various weekly. In the past it has long occupied in history and has edited the Italian edition of the last works of François Furet. In 2007 he published Sarkozy. The French lesson, and in 2015 a the Hôtel de Galliffet biography, in a bilingual edition and illustrated. Marsilio published The sun rises in the South. Travel contromano from Palermo to Naples via Salento (2012, 2 editions), Special Mondello Prize for Literature 2013 trip.