A great emotion that repays years of work: perhaps we could summarize with these words the pride we felt when the Chamber of Commerce of Frosinone and Latina informed us that we had been selected for this award.
We were born in 2017 as an innovative start-up active in the world of tourism and we immediately distinguished Discoverplaces with 2 words: marketing of the territories linked to culture and use of English language.
It all started for fun: on the one hand I did strategic marketing consultancy for public bodies and on the other I was constantly forced to translate people's speeches into English when we toured Lazio together with the Australian partner I was with. In fact, since I discovered Villa Inglese in Picinisco I feel much more relaxed and I can enjoy lunches. Because it's not just the language that is the barrier, it's also the knowledge of cultural nuances.
A hospitalization and a long period of recovering had then pushed me to write the stories of the towna so as not to have to translate everything on the spot. So today Discoverplaces.travel is the largest portal in our region after Visit Lazio (funded by the region) and we have over 15,000 contents in two languages and 30,000 photographs.
The charm of words has always been magnetic to me and so we started the Thursday Newsletter first with the festivals and celebrations of the weekend, then during COVID we started to tell above all our stories and those of the territories with which we collaborate.
Today our Newsletter reaches 15,000 readers a week and is opened by 5,000 subscribers: a great achievement!!
We do internationalization not only with texts in English, but with a particular closeness to all those people who left Italy years ago and who have maintained the desire to be connected with their favorite places. Many of them would like to invest in Italy (and precisely in their village of origin).
For them we created the Town Ambassador Award - Ambassador of the Country which we give together with the mayors of the municipalities (www.townambassador.org) as a small gesture to thank the love that these people have shown for years towards their beloved country of origin.
And when we interview them, we discover a world to which Italians have never had access, sometimes out of laziness and sometimes out of arrogance. As if life had continued only in Italy and had been interrupted for those who had left the country. As if everything that happens outside our country is irrelevant.
When I taught at university, I had the kids do a very simple exercise to explain to them our provincialism and our lack of openness to the world. I opened the Google news page in Italian, then I opened the English, American, Spanish, French and Portuguese ones. While ours was all about internal events, the other pages ranged around the world. After all, Spanish is spoken throughout Latin America and in much of North America and Asia, Portuguese in Brazil and in some African countries and so on.
Perhaps due to this limitation, and the wrong way in which foreign languages are taught at school, Italians are not familiar with other languages and have closed in on themselves. We have therefore been working for years on creating bridges between cultures that can make it easier to conclude business or make the stay of tourists welcoming and this 2023 Business Award is as if it had suddenly repaid us for our efforts.
The award was born from the special company Informare, with the president Luigi Niccolini and vice president Florindo Buffardi, of the Chamber of Commerce of Frosinone and Latina with a commission also composed of UNICAS, which has always been actively involved in the growth of Southern Lazio (….).
Between the two provinces there are approximately 135,000 active companies and 80 of them have been awarded, divided into four categories: Start Up Award; Innovation Award; Internationalization Award; Longevity and Generational Continuity Award aimed at companies active for over 50 years.
And among these I was happy to have met Claudia Pompeo of the Terme di Pompeo di Ferentino with 170 years of activity, and the legendary Marco Sarandrea in Collepardo whose lunches I remember with his father and Prince Antonello Ruffo of Calabria.
The awards ceremony took place in the splendid medieval hamlet of Fossanova, a magical place at the center of gravity between the two provinces, and the star of the day was certainly the exuberant president Giovanni Acampora: "Today we are here to talk about concrete experiences, ideas and projects achieved, in which ambition and determination are the common denominators of the awarded excellences. Recognizing your great contribution to the development and progress of our territories is an opportunity to give credit to the work you carry out, day by day, with self-denial and sacrifice and which benefits the entire community".
Another small Amarcord was the meeting with Bernardino Quattrociocchi, professor at Sapienza University of Rome and general director of MOF – Mercato Ortofrutticolo di Fondi with whom we shared years of splendid collaboration when there were still few of us talking about environmental, social and economic sustainability.
Post Scriptum: among the companies that received the Internationalization Award there was also the Fiuggi Palace in Fiuggi and this made us even more proud. We are really in good company!!
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