On July 31, 1994, an Italian newspaper was the second in the world to land on the Web: the Unione Sarda. The first was the Washington Post, to say. Much has been written on the vicissitudes that lead to this goal (recently in The Italy of the Network, by Gianluca Dettori with Debora Ferrero, Solferino editions). In short, much is due to the fact that in 1990 the Center for Research, Development and Higher Studies in Sardinia, known as Crs4, was born in Cagliari, with the support of director of CERN in Geneva, the Nobel Prize in Physics, Carlo Rubbia.
CERN was the place where in the previous months the young Tim Berners-Lee had “invented” the World Wide Web and Cagliari was a candidate to be an important terminal of that revolutionary drive. Crs4 was born as partnership between Ibm, Saras di Moratti (which in Sardinia had industrial interests linked to oil), and the University of Cagliari. The guide was entrusted to Paolo Zanella, who came from CERN, where he had directed the computer center; at his side immediately came Pietro Zanarini, who has become a strategic figure of Crs4.
It was Zanarini who created the site which, in addition to presenting the team’s scientific mission, also told about the tourist opportunities in Sardinia. But I leave the floor to Dettori and Ferraro (warmly recommending reading the book): “Then one day [Zanarini] he read that the Washington Post was thinking of putting the online version of the paper online and thought of doing an experiment for make L’Unione Sarda also available on the Web. For the first test phase, the project was developed in the dark of the publisher and a young Sardinian was hired, majoring in Computer Science with Degli Antoni in Milan. «One evening» recalls Sergio Benoni, historical collaborator of the Sardinian Union, «Grauso [il proprietario del quotidiano] he goes to get the freshly printed edition of the newspaper and sees a crowd of people in front of a computer, stops and asks what it is. They reply that what he sees on the screen is the digital edition of the Unione Sarda on the Internet, which everyone can read. Like, for example, the participants in a Italian expedition to Antarctica, from which they were receiving the emails at that moment and who expressed their happiness to finally have the possibility to read and be updated in real time on what was happening in Sardinia, in Italy and in the world. Niki Grauso, visionary entrepreneur, pioneer of local radio and TV in Sardinia, also engaged in various initiatives abroad, was thunderstruck. He locked himself in a room with his co-workers and immediately began to think about the implications the Web would have on the global media industry. He created a working group by bringing home some CRS4 researchers and journalists from his staff, and immediately began working on Video On Line, an Internet access service with a portal of digital content and services as well as the ability to browse the nascent Web. “. But that’s another story.
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