Trip to Italy with the President

This article is published in the 22-23 issue of Vanity Fair on newsstands until June 7, 2021

The Quirinal Palace in Rome is like a sleeping giant. More than a year after the outbreak of the pandemic, its monumental rooms resemble an audience waiting for the show to start again. In its infinite spaces, places poised between history and future, Vanity Fair met the President Sergio Mattarella. With him we embarked on the journey that you will see in the pages of this special issue, one of the most important we have made.

It is a Grand Tour, an ideal map that wants to lead you to the discovery or re-discovery of the artistic and cultural heritage of our country.

Do not mistake it, however, for an atlas of Italian beauty, a worn, misunderstood term that has become almost a postcard stereotype, as the President well remembers at the beginning of the letter he wrote for us. This journey in the “treasure peninsula” has to do not only with the attractiveness of the places, but with the meaning of art and above all with the projects of the people who promote and protect it.

In the book Origins, the Lebanese writer Amin Maalouf makes a clear difference between the terms “roots” and “origins”. Roots are something that keeps you tied to the ground, that anchors you to a place, that leaves you immobile. The origins, on the other hand, have a sense of projection, they indicate a provenance but also a perspective, they have in themselves the seed of the past and that of the future.

Here, take the next pages – from the President’s letter to his “Italian trip”, from the exclusive visit to the Quirinale Palace to the author’s tour for the artistic excellence of the regions of our country, from the project #tiraccontolitalia done together with the creators of TikTok to the digital and interactive maps that you find at the end of each article (just photograph the QR Code with a smartphone) – as the testimony of how much our great past is not a root but an origin that pushes us further, far, towards the future that we often do not know or that we do not think we have.

One last note before leaving you to this extraordinary number. Walking alongside the President, along the monumental rooms of the Quirinale, one cannot only admire the splendor of the Rome of the Popes or the furnishings and decorations of the Savoy. Instead, there is a dialogue between Italian contemporary art and design with the past. It is precisely this dialogue that we want to rekindle in order to really restart as a country and as citizens. A dialogue that re-evaluates the past without nostalgia and without regrets. A discussion that feeds on all cultural diversities as sources of wealth. A debate that puts civilization and freedom at the center. And an awareness that pushes the economy and the new generations to draw from culture as from a treasure that has no equal.

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