Translator: Michele Gianella Reviewer: Nicoletta Pedrana
“...it’s the spirit of the people who manage to leave their homes
to get in touch with other people.
Nothing happens here,
you don’t hear a sound.”
The lady you’ve just seen in this video is called Franca.
She lives in Trieste and we got to know her
because one day,
as I was walking past the Masood greengrocer’s
in the street where I live,
Masood called me and said: "Look, there’s a letter for you."
This is the letter, this is the original letter.
The handwriting is beautiful, old-fashioned and clear.
Normally we receive these letters with requests for financial support,
but this is a completely different case...
I read it carefully and here's the story.
The lady says: "I am 81 years old,
I lived in Bologna for many years,
then, years ago, I moved to Trieste,
but I'm at a loss in this town,
I don't know what to do.
I’ve read about “Social Street” in a newspaper
and about the interview you gave,
I’ve read about the greengrocer’s – where we’ve got our P.O.Box –
and I’m sending you this letter, my request to "Social Street":
"Help me to go back to Bologna:
don't let me die in a town where people don't even say hello."
And this is quite odd,
because 300 kms away and 45 years younger too,
Federico Bastiani had had the same problem,
the same intuition that whilst he’d been living in a city
like Bologna for several years,
walking along Via Fondazza he knew absolutely no one.
And very often we have this feeling, but we stop there.
On the contrary, Federico, a dreamer by nature,
said: "Okay, let's try to do something,
let's see if by using a medium
normally used to connect people who live far away,
I can get to know my neighbour."
Madness? However, he did it.
This is the first, the original flyer he created and posted
under the arcades in Via Fondazza in Bologna,
in order to inform citizens and residents of this group’s existence.
This is an important flyer because it shows exactly
what the purpose of this group was.
The goal was to create a reference point
for residents living in this historical street -
there’s still a misprint - in order to socialize,
organize meetings and express needs, a sort of "road bulletin board."
September 2013:
we were expecting - I was one of the first members to join -
very few subscriptions, only 10, 20 or 30 people.
It was total madness
because, in a short time, hundreds of people joined this group.
We weren’t expecting it at all.
We started asking ourselves questions such as: "What’s happening?
Why are people so eager to join this group?"
We’ll leave this question unanswered.
I think I may have time to talk about it later.
What's interesting is what happened.
A Facebook group is a virtual world.
What does Facebook have to do with a street?
It may be totally unrelated, however it's a tool like many others,
like the hammer used for nails or to break a finger.
What immediately happened was that people started interacting on the web
and exchanging information,
so everything that happened was still on the web.
So these people started getting to know each other. How?
Simply by asking information about the street they lived in.
One of the strengths of "Residents in Via Fondazza in Bologna" is that
it covers a very limited area,
so if you asked: "Where is the best doctor?",
you would get an immediate reply -
three answers per question.
"Who knows the cobbler’s opening times?",
"Who can tell me where the best greengrocer is?", and so on.
So people started interacting with each other
on an absolutely virtual level.
But we weren't there on the streets yet.
However, automatically,
people also started to trust one another and say:
"Well, who can help me? My car is stuck in the middle of the road.
Who can give me a hand to re-charge the battery,
to start it and push it?"
People used to say:
"Come down, we're already there to give you a hand to push the car."
"Who can help me, with the move, for instance?
"Who can, for example, look after my cat for a week or a day?"
Requests for help but also offers:
"I have a table that I don't need anymore, who wants it?’;
or: "I ‘m going on holiday, I have a full fridge.
Who needs this food?"
At this point, people inevitably had to meet in the street,
and these exchanges have increased exponentially over the past year.
It must be said
that despite the hundreds of people
who wrote and then interacted,
the percentage of people who really got to know one another was very low.
But of this too we will talk later.
The important thing is that at some point,
not considering this constant flow
of reports and requests coming from people,
we began to think about doing something
that could attract people to the street,
regardless of their individual needs.
So apart from aperitifs, birthdays and so on, we thought...
We're going to show this because it's the first activity we organized.
We were thinking of a Christmas flash mob:
two - three people were in the street
who knew how to play an instrument, we said:
"Let's try to see who's willing to come and celebrate Christmas with us."
The surprise was that on this occasion we found ourselves with about
200 people on the street and another 200 at the windows.
It was two months since the group had come into existence,
so we already had the feeling that something was working,
that people needed to take part in things.
It was a request that they made,
to be pushed out into the street and participate.
We don't have a chosen office;
it's not a committee, it's not an association,
there are no membership cards, absolutely nothing.
The street is our meeting place.
And so we went ahead with other activities, too.
Another beautiful one was a photo shooting.
A boy who lives on that street and works as a manager at "Laika" in Florence,
offered to take photos of the inhabitants of the street.
He said: "Well, five or six will be turning up."
150-200 people showed up and we put up this incredible exhibition of faces,
"The faces of Via Fondazza".
They were hung up, as you can see, with pegs, nothing fancy.
It’s a format, but actually they are photocopies,
quality was not so important.
What’s important is for us to create activities
to make people have an "excuse" to meet.
And we're going on;
we've also gone on to read aloud in various courtyards,
we don't go to a specific place but in the different courtyards of the houses.
And here we have moved to another level. The other level is to say:
"The street usually has a story, and stories must be learnt because
a story means belonging,
a story is something that doesn’t make you see the walls
but what’s behind the walls or what there once was."
This is one of the examples, the witches of Via Fondazza, very famous.
As in all poor streets, they were a well-defined female category,
they made love filters to survive
but also did something completely different.
And also these histories of the Great Fondazza
- Fondazza is a street where Morandi, the painter, also used to live,
not Gianni as someone said: "Can we interview Morandi?"
I said: "Well it's a bit difficult because... he's a bit dead."
But in this street there lived Giorgio Morandi,
who was absolutely an anti-social man,
but also this street was a favourite haunt of Carducci’s.
All the people who somehow interacted with these characters came to talk,
and they're not people on Facebook,
these are people who don't use Facebook at all.
One day we found a poster on the street:
"And we, we who don’t use Facebook, how can we participate?"
Which is absolutely fantastic.
This is another activity in which we take care of the territory,
of the things that are in our territory, in our road.
On this occasion it was Morandi’s garden, which had gone to the dogs,
and we decided to clean it up.
We take care of the planters, we always make them ourselves
so as to have an excuse
to do something together on Sunday morning.
Socializing is the most important thing.
The other point is
that taking care of a street also means finding places to socialize.
Our cities are very poor in terms of places where to socialize.
If anyone wants to sit down or a drink of water,
they have to go to a coffee bar.
And this is true of many other services.
In a few months we managed to pedestrianize this little square,
which is right in the middle of our street with its beautiful church,
and the beautiful story of the Alcanterine nuns of Santa Cristina,
a wonderful place where we’ve held concerts.
It was given to us precisely because of its social value.
So, I’m saying this not to boast,
but actually we feel like a street lab.
What is happening in Fondazza is something incredible because,
first of all, nobody expected it.
We currently have between 25 and 30 dissertation theses
in sociology, anthropology, psychology,
even at the IED, Sapienza Uni and so on.
This means so much to us.
All this because in Via Fondazza,
the resident group now numbers a thousand members,
and later on we'll be discussing why it caught on the way it did.
There are so many things to consider:
why do people who don't even know each other
start to actually want to participate in a social project, what’s happened?
The eighty-something lady
who asks her ninety-something next-door neighbour,
"But do tell me, what on earth is Social Street?"
And her neighbour explains it to her:
"It’s what we used to do in our times, 50 years ago."
Well yes, what we used to do 50 years ago, but now no longer do:
that's interacting with people, greeting, getting to know each other.
You live on a street without having any idea of who lives next door.
So, this is the purpose; to socialize,
which often simply means saying hello to people on the street.
I can see this myself:
it used to take me five minutes to walk along Via Fondazza last year,
this year it takes me two hours
so I have to take another route if I want to get to the station in time.
I know the faces, the names and the stories of the people,
and this is really important because it enriches us greatly.
There’s wonderful news in the medical field.
Living in a highly social environment where you feel at your ease
if I'm not mistaken, decreases by 20%
your likelihood of developing cardiovascular diseases,
From an economic point of view, living in an environment
where there's this exchange which is not the purpose of Social Street,
but enables you to save around 2000 euro
so this aspect is also important.
We wonder why it's easier to have people asking than giving.
This is also important from a psychological point of view.
It’s because these days
we are no longer used to asking for help from others.
We have a ratio of one to three, one to four,
It's very important to also look into this but just now I’ll move on quickly.
We celebrated our first birthday this year with a thousand members,
but numbers aren’t all that important.
What truly matters is getting people to interact.
We never hold huge gatherings, we don't need them,
it’s small groups that organize themselves,
so urban trekking, dinners and the like
are all organized by small groups of people
who can talk and get to know each other.
I’m now moving fast ahead, because I want to remind you that
in Italy there are now hundreds of Social Streets active on the territory,
dozens are emerging all over the world, based on the Via Fondazza model,
and we are very proud
because Fondazza is the world's first Social Street model.
We are present also in Latin America, New Zealand, Croatia and so on.
For the last few seconds, I just want to go back to Franca.
We published her story on our page
and immediately, in two days, we found someone who could
organize a free move from Trieste to Bologna,
we found her a home in Bologna,
I called her and told her: "Franca, it's all sorted out.’’
And she told me:
"Look, Luigi, at this point, I'm afraid to go back to Bologna.
My letter was a way of giving vent to my feelings, I felt lonely,
but now that I know you're there,
for the time being I want to stay here."
This gives us food for thought
because after all,
we often don't need a great deal of help
but we simply need to know
that, should we need help,
there will be someone there for us.
(Applause)