Write to us at:
We look forward to hearing from you.
— Marco and Francesco
Adam Steltzner led the team that landed Curiosity on Mars in August 2012: a rover the size of a MINI Cooper, set down with a maneuver nobody had ever tried before. The Right Kind of Crazy is his memoir, never published in Italy.
In the essay The Lesson to Unlearn (December 2019), Paul Graham argues that the most damaging thing we learn in school is aiming only to get good grades. In his view, school tests created by an authority can be hacked: you can copy, or study past exams to predict the questions. So we end up spending most of our time trying to get around bad tests.
Oscar Farinetti was 52 when he opened the first Eataly, on 27 January 2007 at the Lingotto in Turin, after selling the biggest home appliance chain in Italy. Never quiet. La mia storia (autorizzata malvolentieri) ("Never quiet: my story, reluctantly authorized") is his autobiography.
Oscar Farinetti joins the company on Monday 9 January 1978. His father hands him a forty-square-meter corner where all the products with a plug are piled up. Twenty-four years later Unieuro has more than two hundred stores and passes to the British group Dixons. Never quiet. La mia storia (autorizzata malvolentieri) (roughly, "My story, reluctantly authorized") is his autobiography.
Riccardo Gualino (Biella, 1879) set off at 17 with a first salary of 50 lire and within twenty years became one of the richest men in Europe. Confessioni di un sognatore (Confessions of a Dreamer) is his autobiography, written in 1945 and kept shut in a drawer for more than seventy years, until 2021.
Luca Parmitano is the first European ever assigned to an Artemis program crew: on June 9, 2026, NASA named him pilot of Artemis III. The mission, planned for 2027, will test the lunar landing vehicle and the maneuvers that will bring human beings back to the surface of the Moon, and Luca will fly as pilot, the first European ever on a crew of the program.
Would you do your job even if you weren't paid? Would you do it if you had to support yourself working as a waiter? That's the question Paul Graham, founder of Y Combinator, puts at the center of his 2006 essay How to Do What You Love.
What if time isn't the same for everyone? What if it flows differently depending on where you are? What if past, present and future don't exist the way we think? These are the questions answered by Carlo Rovelli, an Italian theoretical physicist who has spent his life working on loop quantum gravity. The Order of Time is his book exploring these ideas.
"Let everyone else call your idea crazy. You keep going your own way, don't stop": that's what Phil Knight told himself that morning in 1962, at 23, when he decided to import Japanese running shoes into America. Shoe Dog is his memoir.
A 0.07% chance of becoming an astronaut: that was the number Samantha Cristoforetti had against her when, in 2008, she applied for the ESA selection. 10,000 candidates, 6 places. She was 31, didn't have enough flight hours, and had an AMX fighter-bomber to learn to fly. Diary of an Apprentice Astronaut is her autobiography.
"If you asked an oracle the secret to doing great work and the oracle replied with a single word, my bet would be on 'curiosity'": that is the central message of Paul Graham, founder of Y Combinator, the startup accelerator that Airbnb, Dropbox, Stripe, Reddit and Twitch all went through. How to Do Great Work is his 2023 essay, 12,000 words in which he tries to answer one question: how do you find the work you were born to do?
"Settling for a mediocre life is never worth it": that is the line Sergio Marchionne used to close his last public speech, at the University of Trento, in 2017. Less than a year later he died at 66, working until his last day. We have distilled fifty lessons from his life.
Sergio Marchionne is the Italian-Canadian manager who saved Fiat from bankruptcy in 2004, bought Chrysler during the 2008 crisis, listed Ferrari on Wall Street for almost 10 billion euros, and died at 66 after working until his last day. Sergio Marchionne by Tommaso Ebhardt is his biography.
Giorgio Armani is the Italian entrepreneur who revolutionized fashion with two insights: the unstructured jacket of 1975 and the women's power suit. Per Amore is his autobiography.
Brunello Cucinelli is an Italian entrepreneur who built a listed cashmere company with €1.4 billion in annual revenue by applying a rare principle: profit must not cause harm or offense to anyone. The Dream of Solomeo is his autobiography.
Giovanni Soldini is the first Italian to win the solo round-the-world race: on 8 May 1999, after 116 days and 20 hours at sea. Nel Blu is his autobiography.
No episodes found in this industry.
