He arrived eleven years ago in San Francisco “with a handful of dreams in his pocket, a lot of determination” and a very special load: family. From California he is helping to create impact on a global scale, ranging from humanism to science, from technology to philanthropy. Mauro Aprile Zanetti, 49 years old, is the chief business evangelist of the Italian-American scale-up, Cloud4Wi.
Was the last assistant of the legendary poet, artist, editor and activist, Lawrence Ferlinghetti. He collaborated on the pop storytelling of one of the founding fathers of Silicon Valley, the inventor of the microchip Federico Faggin. And now as biographer and strategist of the patron’s philanthropy, Maria Manetti Shrem.
“In San Francisco I invented my mantra as if I had found it on an ancient scroll: ‘Gratitude Makes Things Happen’ – It’s gratitude that makes things happen, not the other way around. I am grateful to America above all for the opportunity of opportunities: allowing me to be able to give, finally becoming who I am. I had to move ten thousand kilometers from where I was born. This is the magic of life: we discover that we belong to the world by leaving our comfort zone; by opening ourselves to others, we fully become the world; by listening to the pain and joy of others, we are able to transform things.”
Mauro, for everyone MAZ, it’s a Sicilian intellectual transplanted to America. In California he lived a thousand lives, reinventing himself in the deepest American spirit. In North Beach, LA Little Italy of San Francisco, is considered “The King” or “The Mayor”: here everyone knows him, even the homeless. Volunteering is an essential part of his life in America.
Renaissance man, multimedia narrator with over 25 years of experience in the independent cinema scene (he has edited several videos for Vinicio Capossela, including the live-drama, In nothing under the sun); she has worked in international communications and PR across the United States, Asia and Europe, publishing interdisciplinary essays in several languages. She has worked as a consultant with organizations such as LVMH, Smithsonian Institution, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the technology and entrepreneurship festival Campus Party, City Lights Booksellers and Publishers, Sotheby’s Fine Arts, and Gagosian Art Advisory.
He became passionate about languages as a child in Sicily because he dreamed of learning about as many cultures as possible: ancient, modern and contemporary. He completed his humanistic studies at the University of Pisa, specializing in filmmaking with a basis in philosophy- his teacher is Gilles Deleuze. From the world of cinema, art history, criticism and literature, he arrives where the future is built first in New York and then going as far asthe final frontierSan Francisco, e Silicon Valley.
“They told me that an intellectual like me had very little to do in San Francisco, overwhelmed by the vortex of fever for technology. But I had come to reinvent myself. History teaches us that there is no technological revolution without humanism. Nobody remembers the tools used to create Brunelleschi’s dome, but the world has admired it for 600 years. In the end, there couldn’t be a more ideal place for me than this city with the highest amount of sky per capita in the world. Because in San Francisco, the sky is not a roof. The sky is an element of the road, it penetrates it like a revolutionary breath to make you dream better. In San Francisco, the strip of white summer fog, which combines the blue of the sky with the carmine red of the earth, is the emblem: here you learn to dream with your feet firmly on the clouds. This is why in San Francisco we can say: the sky’s the limit; and today more than ever. It is no coincidence that everything is tsunami of rhetoric called ‘AI’ see the epicenter once again right here, where some of the greatest talent in the world has been roaming for more than half a century.
Once in California, MAZ stops looking. “Finally, like Picasso with his canvas, with my new city I have only found, or rather I have even been found and chosen on merit. And so I understood even better that we are part of a great energy. We are nano-cells that from deep darkness of the ocean we move mountains on the earth and stars in the sky. Nothing happens alone. It’s one of the many things I learned in San Francisco: everything happens “with” others. Technology allows things that not even inventors could imagine 30 years ago; but magic is only possible thanks to the people who guide it and direct it for the common good, otherwise it is nothing exponential.”
Born in Scicli in the province of Ragusa, as a child MAZ had the label of underdog on him like his favorite team, “the Internazionale”. He loves challenges and overcoming himself, a sports lover, an experimenter, determined and passionate about everything he does “as if it were the first and last time”. The first “master” with life occurs during the high school years. “I attended the JFK linguistic high school in Ispica, 25 kilometers from Scicli. No one from my town had ever gone to study there simply because there were no means of transport. I planned a round trip 6 days a week by hitchhiking. arrived late at school, at home yes: returning is always more complex than going – ask Ulysses. For five years I lived like this: and in those years I made my first great apprenticeship with life. My PhD on the constants and variations of anthropological modification, because I met the world every day when I was 13 years old, dealing with diversity. I was put under pressure, I took many blows, some very heavy, but without ever giving up, and I learned to get back on my feet, becoming more and more flexible. The judo it helped me a lot; horse riding and fencing, and football, of course, which is a team game, and you soon learn that the game is played first and foremost with your team before with your opponents. No one wins or loses alone. In Milan, in Rome, in general in Italy I didn’t fit into the categories. Then my wife, Eva (my Beshert) took me by the hand and took me to San Francisco. And the best is yet to come.“
MAZ travels the world giving motivational speeches, revealing to innovators, creatives and entrepreneurs that technology must be humanized with a sustainable vision of life. Philanthropy (literally love for humanity) has been in his DNA since he was a child. “My mother, especially in the past, treated burnt people. My father is a ‘bone setter’. People of all social ranks came to the house (pain makes everyone equal), who brought us tears as a currency of exchange. I learned without explanations that to soothe the pain of others is to heal the world. I grew up in the world of treatment and of caress for the next thanks to my mother and father, who I visit in Scicli even for a few hours every time I set foot in Italy. And now, looking at the earth from here, I understood that this is my true mission. We need to create a spring even when it is deep winter. There is no technology that can support this undertaking, because inside a car there is only darkness. We need feelings and emotions today more than ever when technology seems to govern every moment of our lives. Which is very short. In this brevity you either get depressed because you don’t have eternity or you understand that eternity is the ephemeral, and you must gratefully love every single breath of the moment. But to do this you have to transform yourself, throw your heart on the other side and understand that life as a gift is more about giving than receiving.”