If Moratti had bought the Internet

Yesterday I did a carrambata. Do you remember what carrambate were, right? Those surprise meetings he organized Raffaella Carrà on TV with unsuspecting guests getting excited. It always works. In short, I put together, in a live streaming video call, some of the protagonists of a mythical evening, forgotten, in a prestigious theater in Milan talking about the Internet. In 1995. I was amazed when a friend had turned me the original poster of the evening announcing “the immersion in the Internet on the big screen”; followed a long list of important guests, above all, Giorgio Strehler, the prince of the Italian theater. Now it must be explained that in 1995 it was something for initiates, as pioneers: what was Parenti said that evening about the revolution that was beginning?

In the live there were Andrée Ruth Shammah, always the soul of the Parenti theater and host of the evening, Nicky Grauso, who in the 1990s traveled the world selling Internet access with a colored briefcase; is Stefano Quintarelli, pioneer and then for a long time, tireless, translator of the meaning of the web for politics (example: the SpiD, of which he talks so much, he designed it). There were many memories, but the most interesting was to discover that the creator of the evening, Milly Moratti, in those months was trying a wonderful but proved impossible feat: convincing her husband Massimo not to buy Inter, the football team. , as he later did in February 1995; but the Internet, understood as the world of the network, become an investor of the future.

That ’95 evening with Strehler talking about the Internet at the theater

Milly Moratti she was unable to connect due to connection problems, but all the others told of several dinners at the Moratti house in which the cause of the nascent web was advocated as the investment to be made. Until the time when Massimo said, “Useless, I just bought Inter,” “. And if instead he had chosen the Internet? He would not have won the treble of course, championships and various cups; his example, other investors would have arrived and we would have had digital startups capable of establishing themselves globally, we would have approached Silicon Valley.

But he bought Inter and not the Internet. The fate of a country in three letters.