«The numbers are not yet what we are aiming for, but the trend is promising. As with all innovative experience parks, it takes time to calibrate the right formula and establish itself among the public, but the idea that generated Fico is a winning one and we are already in contact with various international interlocutors to open new Disneyland abroad in the coming years. of Italian food, where you can enjoy the biodiversity and richness of our agri-food chain while having fun “. There is no fatigue in the words of Stefano Cigarini, current CEO of the “citadel” of the tricolor food Fico Eatalyworld in Bologna, despite the ups and downs from Rome, where he also continues to manage Cinecittà World and despite the pressure on the accounts and ambitions of Italian peasant factory aggravated by the health emergency.
From 22 July, the date of the reopening of Fico, after 5 million investments and six months of construction sites, how is it going?
The number of visitors increases steadily from week to week and confirms that we are on the right track. The new formula with which we reopened, with spaces reduced to a third (80 thousand covered and 40 thousand uncovered), a single entrance ticket (10 €, halved in the evening) and openings from Thursday to Sunday from 11 in the morning until 10 in the evening midweek and end at midnight on Saturday, it responds to the challenge of making Fico an amusement park, where you can discover food with a playful and exciting experience. We went from 6 thousand tickets sold in July, to 28 thousand in August and 32 thousand in September. For this month of October we expect to exceed 45 thousand admissions.
Are the 6 million visitors a year promised by Oscar Farinetti when inaugurating the park in 2017 remain a chimera?
Parks must be judged on decades and decades and not on months or years, especially if they have an innovative format, they are places that have long penetration times on the market, in fact Fico is still a start-up. If I stop people on the street and ask for the names of amusement parks, they mention Gardaland, which has existed for half a century and in the first three years of activity made disastrous numbers. Cinecittà World was in worse shape when I was called in mid-2016: it had 31 million euros in losses and a little less the year before, numbers to take the books to court; and he did not even have an institutional network behind him to support him as has Fico in Bologna. Yet in four years it has gone from 32nd to fourth amusement park in Italy after Gardaland, Mirabilandia and Leolandia with the budget in profit.