Food, Fashion and Home are unquestionably the three main sectors that make Italian taste visible and tangible around the world: what has been identified as the “Italian lifestyle”. It is no accident that, time and again, attempts are made to imitate Italian products – often with great commercial success. Italian taste is not testified only by the brand names of important designers. It is often the work of craftsmen and the small and medium-sized businesses that frequently work in limited market niches and have patiently managed to make their products popular abroad, even in less-than-favourable market conditions. These companies often work also as contractors for important brands, and are thus unknown to the general public. They are companies that are better known for the products than their names.

For example, can you list the five leading producers of buffalo mozzarella from Campania? Yet buffalo mozzarella is one of Italy’s finest food products, and it is exported to many foreign countries, with the United States leading the way.

And did you know that, in all manufacturing sectors, 99% of Italian companies have fewer than 50 employees? These are statistics that are unquestionably little known to the general public, but they are absolutely real. We are talking about more than four million registered VAT numbers that, every day, produce and employ people, often with open-ended contracts. It is a world worth discovering, full of the kinds of surprises you find only in the work of thousands of men and women committed to Italy’s small businesses, putting their passion and talents into them to contribute every day to making “the Italian miracle” come true: creativity and genius become a product and then a business. This is because, wherever you turn, in Italy and around the world, cottage industries and small businesses can be found behind great events and projects, behind innovation but also the defence of tradition. But note that craftsmanship and innovation are not antithetical concepts. Craftsmanship increasingly uses technology to achieve excellence in the food industry as well as wood and furnishings, not to mention fashion. Process and product innovation are not a prerogative of big industry, but a path undertaken by thousands of small businesses and crafts companies that, with the aid of technology, successfully optimize production, prototype new products and are better able to arrive where the hands and head of the entrepreneur want to arrive, always with the aim of going one step beyond known boundaries.