Young people, technology and entertainment, Cassino's bet

When universities link with their territory, there are always positive surprises. This is the case of Unicas, the University of Cassino and Southern Lazio, which has combined two pearls of its territory to give life to the Advanced Training Course in Artistic Production and Entertainment Languages: cinema, music and television.

The two pearls are Andrea Iervolino, one of the major independent producers of Hollywood and the world who lived in Cassino as a young man, and Valeria Altobelli who graduated from Cassino, a master's degree in diplomacy and in the meantime was a finalist for Miss Italy in the world and one of the major protagonists of the world of entertainment and music.

And as Andrea Iervolino and Valeria Altobelli are well aware, the world of entertainment is not only made up of actors but is a truly complex industry where technology and humanism reach the maximum of their excellence. For this reason, together with UNICAS they strongly wanted to give life to a course that prepares professionals who can be immediately inserted in this industry.

On 6 May the inaugural lecture took place in the presence of the rector Marco dell'Isola and the vice rector for teaching Giovanni Betta, two engineers who created the rooting of the university always considering innovation and with an international spirit (link), and of professor Francesco Ferrante director of the laboratory for entrepreneurship.

The Advanced Training Course was born thanks to the scientific directors Susanna Pasticci and Riccardo Finocchi, who come from the humanities and represent the soul of the initiative, while the artistic director is Valeria Altobelli.

Attending the inaugural lesson of Andrea Iervolino were those enrolled in the course and journalists and we had the opportunity to ask him numerous questions. And it could not be otherwise, Andrea is an absolute protagonist of the entertainment business world but is a 34-year-old boy who was born in Cervaro and grew up in the streets of Cassino.

In his speeches, he told about his seventeen-year-old dream and how he had started shooting his first film as a producer - thanks to sponsorships from Cassino dealers and dentists - and how he become a producer of international stars. Among them John Travolta, Al Pacino, Antonio Banderas, James Franco, Johnny Depp and many others.

"If I did it starting as stuttering from a provincial town with no traditions in the entertainment world, then you can do it too. At school they wanted to put me among the disadvantaged, but my Canadian mother objected, and I thank her. I have never felt problems as burdens but as incentives to improve! "

These were his opening words with which he inaugurated the first lesson of the Advanced Training Course. The rest has been one of the best business lessons I've attended in recent years. His life as an entrepreneur was characterized by the continuous creation of new business models thanks to which he became the protagonist of technological innovations (such as those of digital), of distribution (such as the birth of television platforms) and social (with his social network TaTaTu).

It was a real pleasure to spend this morning at university and learn from this 34-year-old boy (almost 35 years old) how life must be faced by managing to smile and transform obstacles into opportunities. But we will write another article about this.

In the meantime, we send 'good luck' to all students and we will follow them in the coming weeks with lessons and speeches by other show business professionals, including actor and voice actor Francesco Pannofino, comedian and actor Pasquale Petrolo alias Lillo, the copyright lawyer Giorgio Assumma, the Sanremo set designer Gaetano Castelli and the director Alessandro D'Alatri.