30 Ottobre 2025
Autori: Matteo De Angelis, Giuseppe Savino
Abstract:
In 2014, when he was 33 years old, Giuseppe Savino decided to leave the permanent job he had been carrying out for 6 years at an Italian aerial service transportation company and found a notfor-profit organization called “Terra Promessa”, along with his brother Michele, his two friends Valeria Carannante and Sanny Torretta, and Don Michele de Paolis, a Salesian priest died at the end of 2014. Son of a farmer based in the area of Foggia, in Apulia, a region located in the South East of Italy, Giuseppe envisioned a revolutionary concept of agriculture: no longer strain and hard work only, but also dream, culture and innovation. This change, in Giuseppe’s vision, needed to ground on a deep cultural change that should have happened in the whole agricultural sector of the Southern Italy: from the typical isolation of farmers to mutual trust and proneness to share knowledge and practices. A few days after, Giuseppe was given 250 euro by Don Michele to register the trademark “Vazapp”. In vernacular, va’zàpp means “go hoeing the soul” and it is an exhortation typically used in the Southern Italy in a derogative manner to warmly invite someone to stop saying lies or using his/her time in an unproductive way. Overturning such a derogative meaning, Vazapp was born under the initiative of a few young professionals led by Giuseppe Savino as a rural hub “which provides innovative solutions to activate social relations among farmers” and whose core mission is to foster territorial identity, social innovation and knowledge sharing among farmers. More generally, the mission of Vazapp is to give dignity and hope to farming so to foster young people to experience it, to make it become their own world and to deeply change it rather than leaving their territory in search of something different and often very risky. Paramount to implement this mission, Vazapp’s people thought, is their ability to instill trust in farmers, which means allowing farmers to overcome the diffidence and the tendency to stay isolated rather than collaborating and sharing their know-how, ideas and farming practices that typically characterize them.
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