who we are
Giorgia Lattanzio
While packing before a journey what can’t be missing in your backpack?
A camera – even a mobile phone is fine, as long as it does it right, captures the details. I’m afraid of forgetting, experiences, people, moments… and photographs remind me daily how much and what I’ve experienced. That life is beautiful, really!
What was the most impactful, trasformational experience you had, professionally or private? Why?
Thinking about the period before the Covid-19 pandemic, I would have answered “my first trip abroad alone”; I was little. I have always been a sunny and energetic child, always looking for little friends, caring and generous with everyone, curious about the sounds of different languages or the colours of other cultures. And that experience – the sensations are still vivid – made me feel good, full of life and self-confident, in a totally unknown place, far from home and with people completely foreign to me. It was one of the strongest and most positive experiences of my life, which gave me so much awareness on a personal level, even though I was so small.
Years have passed and with them many moments and I feel I must also talk about another strong experience: the first (real) lockdown from the Covid-19 pandemic. An opposite situation to the first one described: I decided to spend it far from home – perhaps this is the only link between the two events – but this time to discover a specific person: Giorgia. And there’s not much to say (or maybe I don’t want to): simply, today I am a different person, full and in the right place!
List three values on which you base your actions and your life.
Respect: for what we recognise but above all for what is ‘other’, for people close to us or for strangers, whether it is a question of ways of thinking, acting, desiring, observing… I believe that each of us has something to say about ourselves and in our own way, and respect is the first and great act of listening that we can do.
Love, which may be obvious to some, but not to me: I believe it is everyone’s ultimate goal, everyone’s innate need, to love and feel loved; it is love that guides you in your daily choices and future desires, whether for a person, a thing, an animal, an abstract thought…love gives you life and must be respected (respect returns) in every aspect.
Determination: as a girl who was anything but determined in the past, today I feel that it is determination – not obsession – that is the other force that allows you to really achieve what you feel, deep down; sometimes it may seem that you are not achieving anything compared to what you think you want; but there you have to stop and really listen to yourself. What we really want to feel good and be happy is unique to each person and meant to be found.
What is it in your job that you enjoy the most?
Novelty. Newness in the things to be done: each article has its own plot, each event its own organisation, each responsibility its own satisfaction, each day its own mission. The novelty in the notions that I learn every day. Novelty in the people I meet. Novelty in the way we work every day.
What episode related to your profession would you like everyone to know about? How do you think it can help other colleagues and why?
I will respond with one word and a few lines of explanation. Entrepreneurship: for those of you who have a passion for writing and storytelling, and a curiosity for the unknown, as soon as you have the opportunity, start, as soon as you have an idea, propose it. And if you are still not sure about the value of that product or that experience, start anyway, take the path. Discover and write! Because sooner or later, a circumstance or a person will require that work or that detail that you, driven by a naturally far-sighted desire, have already discovered and described.
Add a personal anecdote, the kind you’d put at the bottom of your résumé – or at the beginning, depending on your point of view – under hobbies and interests.
Someone once told me: “if I had to describe you in one word, or at most two, I would choose travel and discovery”. And the more I go on, the more I realise that this is true. Ever since I was a child, I have always been a ‘sponge of the world’: I leave, I discover, I know, I learn and so I grow. Walking along streets that I do not recognise, having to study their history, not understanding the language of the place and having to invent ways to interact, living habits and listening to experiences that are often difficult to imagine, finding the most secret and precious details, tasting and smelling diversity. And then telling what I have seen and felt…I still don’t know if I would put it at the top, or at the bottom of the CV.