I remember the 21 November 2015 very long orderly line to enter the Reggia di Venaria, early in the morning. There were more than 1000 and for a year they had chosen to commit themselves for free to give a wake up call to digital Italy.
On stage the first to speak, in front of the Prime Minister and dozens of authorities, was Valeria Cagnina, 14 years old at the time, who he had explained “to the grown-ups” what the digital world really is; then it was the turn of Alessandro Baricco, who he had made one of those visionary speeches of his on the meaning of the Net which we would later find in a chapter of the book The Game (“Digital is an earthquake that changes social balance”, he said among other things); and the last one was the tennis player Roberta Vinci, who a couple of months earlier in New York had beaten the great Serena Williams, and given the comatose state of the Italian digital transformation, she had come to tell us that nothing is impossible if you really try. Above all, of that day in Venaria, I remember that Paolo Barberis explained that one day with an app called IO we would have done everything (he did not say that we would also find the Green Pass inside, but he said “everything”, it was obvious); and that the director of AgiD, Antonio Samaritani, claimed that no one was using the Spid yet, it is true, but one day it would be our digital identity, the secure gateway to Internet services, not just public ones, he added; and that the minister of the public function advocated the cause of a strange acronym of which at the time the meaning escaped the most, Anpr, National Registry of the Resident Population; the project was about to start, with a microscopic common test, Bagnacavallo, 17 thousand inhabitants in the province of Ravenna, but then another 8 thousand would arrive and one day we could even download the certificates without going to the Municipality. Indeed, the certificates would no longer be needed.
On stage there was a specimen of the Program 101, 1965, considered the first personal computer in history and symbol of lost opportunities in our country. He was there to remind us what we shouldn’t do: divide, argue, be afraid of the future so as not to lose some position income. I remember we were happy. It really seemed to us that one day those projects would become reality.
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