CATANZARO «On the one hand, the Tourism Department of the Calabria Region (and not only that to be honest) blatantly and systematically demonstrates that it has not yet understood what and what the Extraordinary Calabria is to be privileged, described and promoted in the world, scientifically confusing the possible extraordinaryness with everything that is certainly ordinary and not at all competitive on a global scale (such as beaches and sunsets, sea and mountains, sunrises and horizons). On the other hand, the real project of the Distinctive Identity Markers (MID) which remains the source, the genesis and the only development perimeter of what should have been the launch of Calabria Straordinaria since 2021, not only continues to be explained and motivated with success on all five continents but it, also thanks and above all to the support of the Casa Calabria International network, continues to be read, interpreted and appreciated as the authentic rewriting of the tourist-experiential and competitive narrative of Calabria which, to use again the words of President Roberto Occhiuto, Italy and the world still do not expect”. To reiterate «what is probably becoming the biggest contradiction of regional tourism promotion, with possible relative diversion of financial resources», is Lenin Montesanto, Program Manager of the regional Control Room on MIDs and who in May 2023 officially handed over to the Foundation Calabria Film Commission, the first mapping of Distinctive Identity Markers, as part of a broader program, already financed with over 3 million euros for two years, intended to internationalize and deseasonalize the new and unexplored Calabria, as an experiential destination, certainly not the ordinary one of sunrises and sunsets. «To counteract the very questionable initiatives of the Regional Department, which at this point do not even seem aligned with the contents repeatedly reiterated by the President himself, is the quality international attention that they continue to reserve for the MID project and method prestigious cultural and tourist magazines, associations, social and cultural actors and promoters and in general the large network of communities of Italian-descendants and Calabrians living in the world. After the special dedicated to the MIDs by the prestigious French magazine Radici, after the contribution of Montesanto himself hosted at the headquarters of the Italian Cultural Institute in Beijing, the interviews and insights on radio, TV and sector magazines in the USA and South America, the different story of extra-ordinary Calabria was also the protagonist in Switzerland, hosted by L’ECO, a famous weekly news magazine founded in 1966 and an important point of reference for the Italian community in Switzerland. And right in the Swiss country, Montesanto was invited by Casa Calabria International chaired by Innocenza Giannuzzi to speak on Mid on 14 June, together with the actress Annalisa Insardà and Pino Ambrosio, author of the book Ferramonti, story of a life. «Did you know – begins the editorial in L’Eco – that plastic surgery was invented in Calabria, with the Vianeo brothers who in their studio in Tropea in the 16th century reconstructed the noses of half of Europe; that in the same century the mathematician Luigi Lilio di Cirò planned the reform of what became the Gregorian Calendar now widespread throughout the world; that in the mid-nineteenth century the musician Alfonso Rendano invented the third pedal on the piano; that the Codex Purpureus Rossanesis is preserved in Corigliano-Rossano, the oldest Greek uncial manuscript on the life of Christ and within which there is, among others, also the oldest representation of The Last Supper, more reliable than the much more famous by Leonardo da Vinci?
TROPEA IS NOT JUST THE SEA. This is the statement, which can be extended to all of ordinary Calabria, which gives the title to cover No. 46 of the magazine distributed in the Swiss country and which goes to discover the non-summer face of the experiential destination Calabria. «And did you know – continues the different story, free from landscape and self-referential clichés – that in Crotone, in the School founded by Pythagoras, the famous Theorem attributed to him took shape; that Nosside, the first and only Western poetess, and Zaleucus, the first Western legislator, lived in Locri; and that Giovanbattista Palatino is also Calabrian, the calligrapher originally from Rossano, the most famous of the Renaissance, author of the most printed writing manual in history and to whom one of the most used characters in the world is dedicated; or that in Ferramonti di Tarsia there is the Concentration Camp opened in 1940, the largest kibbutz on the European continent and where no one has ever died? Here, these just indicated are just some of the Distinctive Identity Markers (MID) of Extraordinary Calabria, extra-ordinary precisely because it is new and unexplored; that Calabria which – President Occhiuto’s words always resonate – Italy and the world do not expect. 100 MIDs have already been mapped and their promotion – explains and concludes Lenin Montesanto interviewed in the magazine – will have to represent the main road to deseasonalize and internationalize Calabria as an experiential destination”.
