Translator: Michele Gianella Reviewer: Elena Montrasio
Becoming a parent, becoming a dad, is a wonderful experience.
When you have a child, you immediately think about his future,
what you can do to raise this child well.
You also mind the details, the sport your child will practice,
the school he/she will attend,
the job they will excel at when they grow up;
and maybe the grandchildren that will make you a grandfather.
But the moment they tell you - and your son is only two years old -
your son is autistic,
suddenly the future doesn't look like this anymore.
The future becomes shady.
Sport gets out of the picture, you don't see it.
School will be a problem, you already know.
You know there will be no jobs, no grandchildren.
In the US,
an autistic child is born every 52 children,
while in Europe there are about six million people with autism,
the size of a small State.
And what about Italy?
In Italy there are 600,000 people with autism.
Let me say it again, 600,000:
it means one child, one person out of 100 Italians.
And despite these striking statistics, very little is done for autistic children.
Mind you, the most brilliant initiatives in Italy -
and when I say brilliant, I really mean shining bright -
not only in Italy, worldwide.
Maybe someone recognizes the White House, in this image.
April 2nd is World Autism Day:
institutional buildings light up in blue.
Someone has decided that blue is the colour of autism,
so institutional buildings light up in blue.
So beautiful.
Very useful to raise awareness,
yet absolutely useless
to meet all the needs of people and children with autism.
On April 3rd, the blue of these beautiful buildings is gone,
and schools are still left with no support teachers.
Which still lack on April 5th, April 6th, May 7th -
even in June, at the end of school.
And the few support teachers are often not specifically prepared.
Early diagnosis is needed.
My son was diagnosed, fortunately, at the age of two.
Early diagnosis is crucial:
but then, before he starts the treatment, he gets four, five, six years old.
Early diagnosis becomes somewhat useless -
it's a good thing to have, but it really has to be done early.
Therapies are fully covered by families.
The National Health System funds next to nothing on autism,
And these crumbs are contended by us all.
For example, me and my family,
we did psychomotricity for my son, speech therapy, then hippotherapy
and all that could be done,
all the things that families tipically try to do for their children.
Then, aside from these classic therapies, we started making pizza.
Somebody's laughing.
Pizza: mozzarella, tomato, basil.
The food most eaten by Italians, and also a World Heritage.
Why did we start making pizza?
Because when you have an autistic child,
as it happened to me, to my family,
you tend to close yourself off.
In part, you close yourself off to protect your child,
as it's hard to endure all this.
When your child starts to flicker around,
it's hard for you to stay calm.
When your child begins to jump for no reason,
and you see others watching him,
it is difficult for you to remain calm.
When your child talks to no one in the wind,
utters meaningless words
and you see others staring at you,
your child screams
and people judge you as a bad parent,
because your child is rude.
Autistic boys are big, seemingly healthy boys,
you can't really tell at first sight that they are autistic.
Why did we start making pizza?
Because it gave us a reason to invite a lot of people home.
Pizza got our friends coming to visit us
and my wife and I could finally stay with our friends, with adults;
but the other children came too.
My son Leo's classmates came,
our friends' children came;
and Leo could stay in his home, in a familiar environment,
and do whatever he felt like.
He could jump, he could play, he could pull out his lightsaber.
Leo uses his lightsaber
as a social connection tool to make friends,
He always carries two of them around:
one for the stranger, and the other for himself.
So they play and he makes friends with other people,
he carries friendship from home.
Now I have it: today he gave it to me,
I told him I would talk to strangers, and he said: Dad, bring the lightsaber.
So I'm glad Leo helped me with this, too.
It's getting difficult, we were saying;
but Leo started making pizza with his mom one day,
kneading pizza.
It looked like a strange thing,
and talking about it, even with experts on autism,
they told us that it's actually strange,
because many kids with autism don't like to touch dough, flour, water,
so much so that at some point, me and my wife, we said:
but if a little boy like Leo is able to knead dough, pizza,
maybe even older guys can do it for fun.
I mean, older autistic boys: and so we invited home
Alessandro, Lorenzo, Gabriele, Lollo, the "good giant" Matteo,
a series of boys of working age, between 18 and 24 years old,
and we talked to their parents.
What was a playful thing for us - we told these parents -
could become an opportunity for the future.
That future we failed to see.
We sometimes say "autistic spectrum"
because it becomes a ghost: the future is a ghost, for us.
With pizza, instead,
we thought we could shape this ghost, not just the round one.
And so we set our mind
to organizing a pizza making class.
Still, they told us: the kids will never make it.
There are too many variables at play.
And mostly, their predictions were actually correct.
We started with a group of ten kids:
and the first ones who put their hands on the dough
responded just as predicted by the psychological literature.
They put their hands in the dough and... brrr, gross!
A lot of them were disgusted, but not all of them.
Alessandro, for example, started making pizzas in a wonderful way.
His teacher, his maestro - we call him maestro -
taught him
that pizzas should be slapped from the inside out,
so that the oxygen goes to the edge.
And the edge gets softer, tastier.
And Alessandro does it in a wonderful way.
The same maestro, two weeks later - damn it, I say -
explained to Alessandro that pizza dough is a living thing.
Because it is made with sourdough, because it grows,
because it has to rest for 72 hours.
Well, Alessandro stopped making pizzas.
Now some of you smiled because they got it quickly;
it took us two weeks to understand.
Living things don't get slapped!
Alessandro; autistic; literal interpretation.
You don't slap living things: Alessandro stopped making pizzas.
We had to tell him he had to cuddle them,
and he started cuddling the pizza.
We're the only ones in the world making cuddled pizza.
More than ethics: respect for the dough also!
(Laughter)
Alessandro learned how to make pizzas, and Matteo also learned with him.
Matteo is the good giant, a two-meter tall autistic boy.
He's huge, and speaks with a soft white voice:
when he talks it's a joy, a true wonder.
Alessandro and Matteo learned how to make pizzas,
and we enrolled them in the World Pizza Championship.
700 pizza makers from all over the world:
Japan, Greenland, America, Africa.
700 pizza makers.
We could have enrolled them in a special section,
as one usually does with disabled people.
It would have been a cheap victory: they were the only two disabled ones!
One first, and the other second.
We decided to sign them up with all the other 700.
It was a game to us, not a competition.
Well, in this real-world game,
the two autistic pizza makers both ranked in the first 100.
The cuddled pizza "rocked", you might say.
But what's the important thing?
It's not getting into the top 100; it's proving that you can do it.
It's proving that kids can learn a job,
even those jobs they're not supposedly able to do,
because they have a bad relationship with flour, with water,
and all these things with a strange tactile experience.
But running a restaurant also takes waiters:
pizza makers are not enough.
What did we do?
The guys who couldn't work the dough were enrolled them as waiters.
We set up for them a "mise en place" class.
I didn't even know what the "mise en place" was,
I never did catering before "Pizza Aut",
the name of this restaurant.
Anyway, we taught them how to serve in a professional way,
how to clear and set the table in a professional way.
While we were doing that, we noticed a thousand problems.
Remeber, these are autistic kids:
many of them have a hard time, relating to others is a major challenge.
Many of them have a hard time talking to others.
So we asked a multinational company,
whose name I won't mention to avoid product placement,
if they could build an app for us,
a visual app made entirely in augmentative communication,
all with images.
This way, through images,
the kids took the orders in an incredibly correct way.
They go to the customer at the table,
with the help of images
they recognize pizzas and their ingredients.
And they work as waiters, just like all other waiters do.
Of course, technology helps them.
The same happened with pizzas.
I told you that the kids have become excellent at making pizzas:
but when they take the shovel and put them in the oven,
they forget to take them out, and burn them all.
Because autism is an evil beast:
they turn away, prepare more, and forget about those.
We invented - it already existed, we just tinkered with it -
a tunnel oven.
There is a sort of carousel:
the kids put their pizza on this wheel,
the wheel brings the dough inside the oven;
the oven cooks it;
the same wheel takes it out,
and another autistic waiter takes it and brings it to the table.
Opening your mind, opening your heart, opening your thoughts
bring us creative solutions that build inclusion.
Mind you: on July 9th,
just to fully work on inclusion,
we went to the Senate of the Republic
to make pizzas.
It was an incredible experience: here is the press conference.
At a certain point, Francesco stood up and blurted things out to the journalists.
Such a pleasant experience.
(Laughter)
But what happened?
Senators of the Republic
understood deeply, firsthand, what autism really is.
What this spectrum is,
which affects people completely different from each other.
They understood, there's a lot of things you can do.
And with them, we're working on a bill
to make it easier for autistic kids to enter the job market.
A law, hopefully, not only for Italy,
a law that can be ported to other jurisdictions,
where companies can consider hiring people with autism
not out of social responsibility, not out of their good heart,
but because young autistic people are just as capable of productive work.
When children work, they become extraordinarily capable, effective,
their self-esteem goes up and they do incredible things.
Mind you, we did 100 nights around Italy in 100 different restaurants.
From Veneto to Calabria, Sicily, Marche:
the moment we get to Sardinia, we've been everywhere in Italy.
In 100 evenings, we baked and served 30,000 pizzas.
And someone told us it would be impossible.
Actually, you can really do a lot of things by opening up,
listening to what the kids are able to do
and building the proper setting so they can do it.
After our visit to the Senate,
and the preliminary work to create their jobs,
we thought that our kids
could finally take a different role in society:
no longer as inmates, patients, disabled, handicapped;
but as workers instead.
Look: right now you all, in the hall,
are paying my boys a disability allowance.
The moment we hire these boys, they will pay your pension.
That's the real revolution, that's the real inclusion.
(Applause)