Ladies and Gentlemen…

Editorial by Stefano Lavorini

Ladies and Gentlemen… Miserendino! I’m jokingly echoing the comment made (probably) by Max Yasgur, organiser of the Woodstock concert of 1969, during which Carlos Santana made his debut on the international scene, playing Soul Sacrifice.
Years have passed and the latitude is different, but there is some news in our small world.

I’m leaving the helm of ItaliaImballaggio from 2025, leaving to Davide Miserendino the task of taking the venture forward. Looking ahead, I would like the magazine, which I founded 30 years ago, to have a future without me, putting an end to the unavoidable overlapping of private and public life.

Eugenio Scalfari - forgive my audacity - used to say to people at the end of his career that “The past is a deposit in the memory, that lives in the memory, and changes in the memory. But it’s not a cemetery”.

This, therefore, is the right moment for taking stock and remembering, but I don’t intend to indulge because, after all, I think that those who have read and known me will have their own private small universe of sentiments, which shouldn’t be confused with that of others.

In a nutshell, I’ve tried, without excessive expectations, to write a story: mine.

I’ve been driven by the presumption of innovating the way of understanding and producing B2B magazines, specifically in the packaging sector, a sector to which I had been “assigned” since 1981. In this enterprise I’ve had the good fortune of having an exceptional person at my side, the co-director Luciana Guidotti, with whom I’ve had the good sense to share decisions and daily life and who I can now define as my “life partner”.

Putting into effect what I may have understood about civil values linked to progress and innovation, democratic values, social justice, legality, rights and ethics.

And today, ultimately, paraphrasing Umberto Galimberti, I remain of the idea that it is essential to save the work that technology is increasingly humiliating.

I am, at the end of the day, someone who will never stop believing in life and therefore, by way of consolation, if the right conditions are created, I will not disappear from the magazine, since I would like to continue as a columnist, perhaps with a piece on the last page, characterized by topics of an occasional nature. It’s also for this that I thank the editors.

To all readers, partners and colleagues, I close with a wish, of uncertain attribution, perhaps by Saint Francis of Assisi: “Start by doing what is necessary, then do what is possible, and suddenly you are doing the impossible”.

Ad maiora (Towards greater things).