On Friday 14 May, at 6 pm, the third local meeting on South Working & Learning Practices in Calabria took place in live streaming.
The discussion with the young experts of “The Revolution of the Cuttlefish” from Belmonte Calabro (CS) and Silvia Salmeri, South-Worker and CEO of “Inspirational Travel Company” concerned the phenomenon of smart working, which exploded during the Coronavirus emergency in following the first important lockdown of last Spring.
The phenomenon of the so-called South-Working has also conquered the national and international press. In recent months, in all the Regions of Southern Italy, it has recorded important numbers with about 100,000 workers returning to “repopulate” the South. Over the past 20 years, more than a million workers have moved to the Center North to find more opportunities.
Many of our villages and towns today, partly depopulated and which could become “slow & smart” places not only for tourists, can represent the right destinations in which tradition and innovation, native and foreign, slowness and authenticity of the styles of typically Mediterranean life with contemporary international technology and dynamism.
IS Friday 14 May at our webinar “South Working & Learning Practices in Calabria”, which will go live on this Facebook page at 18.00, we will have guests the young experts and professionals of “La Rivoluzione delle Seppie” from Belmonte Calabro (CS) .
We met “Le Seppie”: a cultural association which, through research, planning, design and training, aims to improve the cultural fabric of the community, to promote social integration and the development of the territory.
It is an active group of young international professionals operating in Calabria, interested in exploring the boundaries of practice and education. Their goal is to rethink architecture through the responsible use of resources as a method of modeling places and to develop an informal education path based on the concept of “learning by doing”.
From 15 to 22 November 2019 they experimented an international “South Learning” project, hosting a study trip for students of the London Metropolitan University at “Casa BelMondo” in Belmonte Calabro (CS).
The London students had the opportunity to have some important local experiences by discovering some craft traditions typical of the area. The following workshops were organized in the weeks of stay and study: Basket weaving, Handcrafted soap, Pasta degli Ziti, Processing of dried figs, Traditional music, Silk processing, Construction of the puppets.
Silvia Salmeri, on the other hand, lived a “nomadic” life with her husband up and down Italy, dividing herself between Bologna and Soverato. Since last year they became parents of Aeneas in the middle of the pandemic, they decided to make the leap and move to Soverato to raise the child by the sea and improve the quality of their life.
She is the founder of Human Destination: an online tour operator specializing in inspirational travel (a concept they have created) for women. The goal is to shift the focus from the destination to the person and, specifically, to the inspiration she is looking for from that particular journey. For this reason, 2 hours of travel counseling are included in each package (one before leaving and one upon returning). Through travel counseling we try to understand what expectations these women have from the journey they are going to undertake, what they want to take with them, what to leave at home. We try to support them, also through an inspirational diary with some exercises that we give as a gift.
The aim is to internalize the experience to the maximum, to combine the useful with the pleasure and ensure that they also become journeys of personal growth.
Written by
Erika Gerardini – JUMP Team Leader and Project Manager