EDITORIAL

“T

here’s no recipe”. In explaining his idea of the way to deal with the obstacles in life, twenty-year-old Sammy Basso, suffering from progeria, an extremely rare genetic disease also known as precocious aging, has no doubts: “The only ingredient is ourselves”. And he adds, “accepting who we are, believing in ourselves. And when faced with walls, not stopping, but using them to climb to the top and look beyond”. Extraordinary among the many magnificent speakers in the fourth edition of TEDx in Lecce, in the Politeama Theater absolutely packed with an audience that showed its enthusiasm for all the participants, Sammy received the only standing ovation.

TEDx, this year also in Bari in a successful first edition, is a program of events that intends to spread ideas of value. Since its creation over thirty years ago in California, the speakers who have taken part in the American editions include names like Bill Gates, Al Gore, Stephen Hawking and Isabel Allende. Today it is held in more than 130 countries and 1.200 cities all over the world. The formula: an inspirational theme and extraordinary stories told live by ordinary people. The theme inspiring the event in Lecce, as usual well organized by Gabriella Morelli and Vito Margiotta and presented this year by Morelli along with the journalist Pierpaolo Lala, was “revolutionary roads”. In practical terms, the non-orthodox roads to achieve success or find oneself.

A touching and warmly applauded talk was given by the blind Vincenzo Rubano, who was able to “look into the distance” thanks to his outstanding intelligence, insight and will-power. After graduating from high school in Lecce with full marks cum laude he was called a madman when, in his condition, he said he wanted to study Computer science. He is successfully doing just that at the University of Bologna and in 2012 he set up the site www.titengodocchio.it with the aim of making internet sites accessible for the disabled. Today he is the only Italian developer in the international team of Drupal, one of the most important open source Content Management Systems in existence. Curiosity and perseverance are the key words in the journey of the American Angela Sun, a marine biologist, journalist and film director whose focus is on denouncing the damage done by plastic in the marine ecosystem. Her documentary, Plastic Paradise, recounts her journey to a tropical paradise inundated by tons of plastic trash. There was wild applause for the talk by Max Casacci, guitarist, composer and author of the songs of Subsonica, who issued a warning about the market mechanisms which more than ever today stifle and flatten the creativity of whoever writes music, and begged us never to lose sight of countercultures – of which San Francisco has always been the home par excellence – the life blood of all forms of creativity. The audience’s emotional level rose with the beautiful talk by Andrea Pietrabissa, professor of General Surgery at the University of Pavia and pioneer of laparoscopic surgery, a talk that began with a line from the song Emozioni by Lucio Battisti and with the illness that struck the great singer-songwriter, and went on to recount the scientific progress made and the successes of the new surgery using robots with mini-invasive techniques. He then told about the case of a young man whose life was being destroyed by the pathology, but who was saved thanks to the donation of a kidney from a live donor, his mother, with the happy ending of his return to a normal, full life. And with the moving final revelation: the boy and his mother were his own son and wife.

There was great interest in the participants of the “NeturalWalk”, anthropological walks by groups of strangers who decide to share discoveries and stories along the way, inspired by a simple life removed from social pressures, and in the impassioned contribution by the director Paola Leone, who since 2011 has been leading the theater workshop “Io ci provo” (I try) with the inmates of the Lecce prison “Borgo San Nicola”. And then there were engrossing stories like that of the courageous journalist Lirio Abbate or the businesswomen who transformed failures or difficulties into success stories, researchers or planners with fascinating stories, the future of humanoid robotics recounted by Giorgio Metta of the IIT in Genoa, and a very high profile designer like Marco Rainò, who transformed “revolutionary” into “evolutionary roads”, telling the story of an illiterate Native American who, in the 1800s, managed to invent a syllable alphabet for his people, and concluded by stating that design and planning must be tools of social transformation. And to conclude, the infectious energy of the performance by the “Coro delle mani bianche” of Testaccio Music School, made up of deaf children with special abilities, and the “Giovane Orchestra del Salento”.

Besides being a cultural event of great depth, TEDx yet again shows that it can provide a compelling overview of the positive trends of the contemporary way of feeling. And then the formula says it all: on the stage, apart from a few slides, there is only the speaker, a person alone who tells the audience about his own experience, in person. The message is clear and “revolutionary”: to rediscover the ancestral practice of the oral tale as a new means of intellectual growth and progress, and, in a world dominated by technology, to reinstate the central position of “the person”.