“I am personally experiencing how difficult it is to do business in Italy, but I would like to tell young people of my age not to give up and to insist on seeking innovative business solutions, because sooner or later their efforts will pay off”. The speaker is Marco Norberto Bernabè, son of Franco, until a few days ago president of Telecom Italia: he is 35 years old, was born in Paris, currently lives in Rome where he obtained a degree in Business Administration ten years ago and, after having lived in Barcelona, Vancouver and London and after a period of about four years in Hong Kong working as financial controller in the Asian conglomerate Hutchison Whampoa, he decided to combine his passion for yoga with his entrepreneurial vocation. In December he will inaugurate an innovative yoga centre, already christened RYOGA, in Rome in Via Servio Tullio, in a historic building in the neighborhood right in front of the Ministry of the Economy. If the experiment is successful, it will be replicated in other Italian and European cities.
Marco Norberto is certainly a lucky guy but also innovative and courageous. He is lucky because he was born into an excellent family, which allowed him to study and live abroad and which gave him well-being, a solid education and quality values. But he's also innovative because he's understood for some time that, if there's a chance of making it big by doing business in Italy, it's only by carrying out new projects. Courage is that of those who, in these perilous times, invest good money to open a company. “Actually – says Marco – I'm also lucky for another reason: because I have the possibility of cultivating two passions at the same time. That for yoga and sustainable well-being and that of business. I'm trying to launch a pioneering and mass yoga center in Italy, on the model of those I met in Canada and Hong Kong and which don't exist here: that is, a multidisciplinary yoga center, with attention to the smallest details but within everyone's reach . I am convinced that such an idea can give satisfaction to customers, who can experience in the center of Rome an offer suitable for all needs and open at all hours and at affordable prices, and also to the entrepreneur who risks his own but puts pioneering ideas in our country”.
But where did Bernabè junior get this idea of a mass yoga center that becomes a business? “I discovered yoga in 2005 in Vancouver, where I was applying for a master's degree in management and business administration, which I then decided to leave out by moving to Hong Kong for work. I had injured myself snowboarding and someone advised me to do yoga: it was there that I met a new world and that I began to fall in love with it. I immediately saw that in Canada yoga was not a marginal activity of some gym or some wellness center but a very well organized activity. But it was in Hong Kong, when I was working in the finance department of Hutchison Whampoa, that I began to study yoga centers from a business and corporate organization perspective. It was there that she discovered yoga as a mass phenomenon and not because Asians were fanatics of this practice but because in the yoga centers there were many Westerners, investment bank brokers, wives of American and European entrepreneurs but also simple people. When I returned to Italy I began to wonder why yoga wasn't as widespread as it is in Asia or America and I convinced myself that we lacked not so much demand as supply".
To try to make yoga a business, an innovative offer was needed, aimed at ordinary people looking for well-being at acceptable prices, but managed with professionalism. “In designing the pilot center in Rome that we will open in the next few days, we have studied all the details. I mention three: the first was the choice of location. In Asia, I had noticed that the favorite venues of yoga centers are those suitable for retail and it was of great satisfaction to see that I had won the tender to rent the two floors of the almost 400 m15 building in Via Servio Tullio against a large supermarket chain . The second innovative aspect is to think of yoga as an aerobic activity but with a low skeletal-muscular impact and carried out in a room heated by remote infrared rays which allow the body to be pre-heated, avoiding injuries and promoting sweating which guarantees the disposal of toxins, and that's what we'll do. The third innovative aspect is the obsessive attention to detail and above all to the materials used: when the yoga masters who will collaborate with us saw our premises all finished in stone, marble and wood and discovered that there were as many as XNUMX showers in a "spa-like" environment left their jaws agape, because a holistic center of this kind, entirely dedicated to yoga, is not even found in the wellness areas of five-star luxury hotels in Italy".
But perhaps the most innovative aspect of Marco Norberto's project is the so-to-speak philosophical one: “We need to erase from the collective imagination the belief that yoga is a mysterious activity practiced only by Indian holy men organized into impenetrable sects: in the great Asian metropolises and American it is not like that and yoga is a mass practice, aimed at those looking for a form of sustainable well-being against the stress of modern life. Yoga shouldn't be thought of as an activity that requires long and expensive retreats but it can be a happy interlude in a normal day for very normal people”. Without physical risks and at affordable costs: from 15-20 euros for a single lesson up to annual full-time subscriptions of around one thousand euros, the price of a normal gym in a city centre.
Bernabè junior has already enrolled around 30 people in the initiative who will contribute in various capacities and is ready to go: in the RYOGA centre, in addition to the spaces for lessons, there is a refreshment center with organic products and a shop selling accessories for the yoga (from classic mats to bags and towels). Personal investment is no small matter but the biggest obstacles – as usual – were of a bureaucratic nature. "Hopefully, we hope to be even in 24 months: it's a challenge but we'll draw the conclusions later." And, if so, the formula will repeat itself. “We are already investigating the possibility of opening a center in Luxembourg with a specialized and already established local partner who has embraced our “RYOGA Corporate Identity“.
In a short time, since he started talking about his pilot project on his Facebook page, Bernabè jr has received more than 3 questions from people asking for news to be able to attend RYOGA or to offer themselves as a collaborator. It's a good viaticum and a sign that sometimes ideas run faster than you think. In short, from one Bernabè to another. Good luck, Mark.
