Ottimismo e Fiducia nel Futuro

Slow Finance pays particular attention to one of the greatest contemporary challenges: loneliness and depression, which lead to despair. It also focuses on social exclusion, the nihilism that leads to social rejection, or forms of violent conflict against the chimeras of Capitalism and/or Communism. It intends to do so by reorienting itself, observing and attempting to emulate—"copy, as he would say, the case presented by Oscar Farinetti.

 

Born in Alba in 1954, he founded Eataly, taking it worldwide. He supported and amplified the message of Slow Food, making Italian products and supply chains globally renowned. Farinetti is also President of the Friends Association (which funds) the University of Gastronomic Sciences (UNISG) in Pollenzo; He has written more than ten books—from Coccodé to Storia dei sentimenti umani, from Ricordiamoci il futuro to Serendipity—demonstrating that entrepreneurship and storytelling are not mutually exclusive, but rather mutually nourish one another. In his generational uniqueness, he has accomplished more than many would have thought compatible in a single lifetime: creating economic value and cultural value—common goods and relational goods, as Carlin Petrini would say—moving fast and thinking slow, building large structures while remaining faithful to small and local roots.

 

On the immediate level of enthusiasm, but also on deeper logical levels, Oscar Farinetti's narrative-entrepreneurial example was decisive in contributing to the success of the Slow Food movement, combining it with a more commercial, merchant-like stance, and proposing a new relationship with capital—capital, we might say—acting as a link with finance through a new way of doing business.

From this perspective, the OFF Club project emerges as an epistemic-practical device consistent with the principles of Slow Finance, in which reinterpreting narrative and entrepreneurial trajectories—like that of Oscar Farinetti—allows us to counter the models of the turbo-extractive linear economy, reactivating relational, symbolic, and economic circuits founded on trust, reciprocity, and long-term generativity.

 

Recognized by all as a public figure, author, speaker, and master communicator, he garners envy, resentment, and undeniable disagreements (some speak ill of him, indeed, very badly). We have developed a sincere affection for him, and on our own initiative, a handful of strangers who knew his exploits and admired his ways decided to freely associate, read his books, and participate in the evenings and events of the Permanent Resistance Workshops and the Walks in the Forest of Thoughts in Fontanafredda, organized by the Mirafiore Foundation. We exchanged ideas, identified with him, and measured ourselves against his "larger footprint," finding in him, in some ways, and without mythomania, but grasping good practices, including, first and foremost, the guiding values ​​of Optimism and Confidence in the Future. (O.F.F.)