La Repubblica was the first Italian newspaper to bring its work, content, and journalists to the stage in the major festival that held its first edition in Bologna in 2012. Elastica supported the prestigious paper in helping start up the project, collaborating on all the events the paper held in the past seven years, all over Italy.

Opening discussions and proposing ideas for confronting social, economic, and political issues: these were the goals of La Repubblica delle Idee, the cultural event created in 2012 by former-editor-in-chief Ezio Mauro, inviting major personalities from politics, culture, industry, and entertainment to the stage. Elastica curated the translation of content into programming, as well as organization, administration, and filming.

“I believed it when teachers told me I was an idiot and, therefore, had no future. I could not see myself in progress. Adults never tell you that you should stop worrying because everything will be alright sooner or later, that time passes”. Daniel Pennac, the “former dunce” – as he sometimes calls himself – was one of the most acclaimed guests at Repubblica delle Idee in Palermo in 2014. “Let’s go back to school” was the title of the two-day event featuring as speakers Ilvo Diamanti and Minister Stefania Giannini, Elena Stancanelli, Massimo Ammaniti, Concita De Gergorio, to mention but a few. In Reggio Emilia, the last stop in 2014, the topic was food, in collaboration with Slow Food. “Il cibo siamo noi” [“Food is us”] was the title of the two-day event with guests including economist Mariana Mazzucato, the president of Slow Food Carlo Petrini, the Father Superior of Bose Enzo Bianchi, the Minister for Agricultural Policies Maurizio Martina, the President of Coop Italia Marco Pedroni and the producers Giannola Nonino and Pasquale Forte. Plus Don Luigi Ciotti, Stefano Rodotà and Attilio Bolzoni, and of course a great chef had to be featured: this time it was the turn of Massimo Bottura, from Modena.

The 2015 edition of the newspaper’s festival was held in Genoa, entitled “Rethinking the world.” Although ambitious, this topic made it possible to outline all the items on the agenda from a forward-looking perspective. It was four days with over 80 events and 200 speakers, including the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Tawakkul Karman, writers Alessandro Baricco and Niccolò Ammaniti, the founder of Slow Food Carlo Petrini, actors Claudio Bisio and Alba Rohrwacher, plus two great singer-songwriters: Paolo Conte and Ivano Fossati. Not to mention Renzo Piano, Gipi, Altan, Adriano Sofri and Massimo Bucchi.

In 2017, Repubblica delle Idee returned to Bologna, where it all began, with four days of meetings, lectures, debates, music and entertainment under the title of “Orienting Ourselves in the World’s Clutter.”

Again in Bologna in 2018, Repubblica delle Idee was four days of photographing the world and answering the question “What happened to the future?”. It involved more than 110 events, ranging from literature to technology, from cinema to sport, from science to economics. There were discussions about democracy and the unemployment crisis as we know it today, the impact of artificial intelligence, scepticism towards science, the endangered environment, migration and migrants, combined with human drama.  Speakers included writers, directors, musicians and philosophers as a way of measuring the current climate of art and culture.