November 15, 2017, FICO (Fabbrica Italiana Contadina) opens in Bologna. Shortly before in Milan at the Palazzo Reale, the exhibition dedicated to the Rinascente department store was closed to celebrate the first hundred years of the brand’s existence.
March 8, 2018 I reach the Bologna exhibition area and enter FICO. While visiting this immense park dedicated to the excellence of Italian food and wine production, the almost concomitance of the two previous events does not elude me but on the contrary manifests itself as a revelation.
Mastery, elegance, good taste and stock coincide in the concept of FICO as well as they were married in the name created by Gabriele D’Annunzio for the Italian site created on the model of the Le Bon Marché in Paris.
With these intentions and under that star was born the Rinascente, name suggested by the poet Gabriele D’Annunzio to symbolize the rebirth of the store.
One hundred years later, Oscar Farinetti (creator and owner of Eataly) takes over the goal of Borletti (creator of the La Rinascente chain) to focus on the elegance of department stores, immediately committing to increase the quality of the goods sold, even without raising prices excessively . The aim announced at the time was a “democratic” approach to luxury, to attract both high and middle-class customers.
One hundred years later, walking along the decumanus that separates the “factories” from the “rides” and from the beds planted with vegetables, you can still breathe this democratic approach to luxury.
In 2018 Italian food and wine presented itself as the new flywheel of the country’s economy and the success of the FICO initiative taken as a whole shows it in full.
Salami cheeses and fish biodiversity, finally explained with an experiential pedagogical approach, take up their intrinsic value in contributing to the national Gross Domestic Product.
In the year in which Italian pizza has been recognized as a “World Heritage Site” UNESCO, Farinetti has valued not only thousands of local products and excellences but is creating as it was for La Rinascente warehouses, hundreds of jobs across the agri-food chain.
Experimental park therefore a large warehouse or simply FICO; a trip to Fico deserves to think about it.
Because it is very satisfying for an Italian to think of belonging to a territory that produces so much beauty and taste.
The excellences are all there for each of the territories of the Bel Paese and are accessible and correctly narrated so that they can be shared, tasted and possibly sent to destination also from the other side of the world.
The logic with which this immense construction has been conceived is that of accessibility and knowledge.
“Seeing is believing” go and taste then and taste again because as good as the narrator is good the taste sensations are individual and unique.
It is easy to get to FICO and inside you move easily with the bike or train, whatever experience you want to try and ‘designed not to be boring or difficult “child-proof in all respects”.
Here is if you still had to worry about the big dilemma if the egg or the hen was born before you could propose the question to the little humans who wander around the FICO “rides” or those who try to talk with the animals in the fences or those who realize the candies in the “factories”.
Thanks to the many interactive games that make up the rides: the elements, the living beings and the land that we tread on every day will end up having no more secrets, bringing us all to have greater respect for the planet that hosts us proud to be Italians or humans who live in the territory with the greatest biodiversity of the solar system!
Link a FICO
https://www.eatalyworld.it/en/
Exhibition La Rinascente
Fiaccavento Margherita was born in Rome in 1968. Having long studied for a diplomatic career in Rome and Paris rejects the constraints by developing a rebellious and non-conformist life. After 15 years of professional experience managerial changes to television as a writer and web content. In 2012 he left Rome and the Eldorado media for the Emilia countryside. “Amazon on me”and ‘his first work of fiction.