November 30, 1995 in Milan, in the historic theater Franco Parenti, for the first time the Internet came onto the scene. It was really revolutionary and a little crazy. Pioneering. Thanks to the invention of the world wide web, the use of the Internet was just starting to grow around the world. The year before in Sardinia the entrepreneur Nicky Grauso he had put the Unione Sarda online, one of the first newspapers to take this path. But the Italian users were very few, 0.5 percent of the population: just over a couple of million. That’s why that evening at Parenti (not improvised, but on the bill nine months earlier) revised today appears astonishing, a leap into the future in an Italy that is still totally analogue.
He passed the poster to me a few weeks ago Stefano Quintarelli, one of the pioneers of the Italian network and protagonist of the historic Milanese evening. On a blue background there is a black, white and yellow plastron which reads “Internet, The world on the net? Guided Big Screen Internet Immersion Marco Maiocchi, Daniele Marini and Stefano Quintarelli “. (Marco Maiocchi: physicist and professor at the Politecnico di Milano, who later will be one of the collaborators of Gianroberto Casaleggio. Daniele Marini: professor of sociology in Padua. I have already said about Stefano Quintarelli).
The names of the protagonists followed: Filippo Azimonti (historical journalist of the Republic of Milan, who was media partner of the evening); Roberto Cicciomessere (which a few years earlier had created Agorà Telematica, a historic BBS that anticipated some functions of the web); Fiorella De Cindio (professor of digital citizenship at the University of Milan); Gianni Degli Antoni (a computer teacher who talked about the possibilities of the network since the 1980s); Nicola Grauso (the entrepreneur mentioned earlier for the Unione Sarda and who in 1993 had founded one of the first Internet Providers, Video On Line); Renato Mannheimer (sociologist, at the time and for a long time, number one of our own pollsters); Roman frame (well-known urban planner); and finally, hear hear, Giorgio Strehler, the prince of the Italian theater.
What could a genius of Strehler’s caliber ever say about the Internet in 1995? I haven’t been able to find out yet. Yet in recent weeks I have talked several times with the two women who were the architects of such a pioneering evening: Milly Bossi Moratti, a multifaceted woman whose husband had bought Inter Milan three months before the Parenti event, signed the event as curator; is Andrée Ruth Shammah, theater director and soul of Parenti, who instead was the presenter. What really happened on the evening of May 30, 1995 at Parenti? Was there public? The ticket cost 10 thousand lire.
To talk about it, tomorrow, May 31, at 12:30, I invited Andrée Ruth Shammah, Milly Moratti and other protagonists of that event to Tech Talk, the daily Italian Tech appointment in live streaming. Follow us, it will be fun.
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