The other Florentine, Matteo Renzi, placed him in his personal Pantheon alongside Tony Blair, Giorgio La Pira and Barak Obama. Nice mash up! As a good Apple addict, Renzi hardly separates himself from his MacBook Air. When he runs, he listens to Obama's speeches in English on his iPhone 6s headphones downloaded in M4a format on iTunes Music. He also has an iPad Air to prove that he feels part of "that wonderful world of free spirits from Apple", to use his own words. He also managed to convince Tim Cook to pay 300 million to the Italian tax authorities, based on a dubious claim made by Equitalia that Apple's lawyers could have countered (as they are preparing to do in Europe), and to open a center in Pomigliano research that will give work to a few hundred people.
There is even a shot that portrays a chubby twenty-year-old Renzi sitting on the curb of the flowerbed on which the panel with the Apple logo is installed on the Cupertino campus, 1 Infinte Loop. Renzi's declaration of love for Steve Jobs was collected by Claudio Cerasa in August 2011 as part of an extensive report on "Il Foglio" dedicated to the co-founder of Apple, who resigned that day from all operational positions in the company .
In politics, Jobs' lesson was learned by Barak Obama, says Renzi: "The first politician to be able to speak, with Jobs' language, with his way of doing and even, pardon the word, with his values , it was obviously Obama, and no one today can say better than the American president that he is a sincere interpreter of that creative, joyful, artistic and revolutionary spirit of which the inventor of the Apple has become the spokesman”.
But Jobs did not have a great opinion of Obama and when he met him during a dinner in Palo Alto in the Greek restaurant, Evvia, with the brutality of which only he was capable he said to him: "You are a president who will not be re-elected". Then the opposite happened, but Jobs was enraged, according to his biographer, because the president: "although he was a perspicacious man, he continued to say the reasons why things could not be done, instead of saying how they could be done".
“Innovators must ship” was one of Jobs' mantras. Here is something Renzi should have learned.
Florence, a city love
Renzi's love for Apple was reciprocated by Steve Jobs' love for Florence.
In 1992, replying by fax to the Florentine group which at the time was marketing its NeXT computers in Italy, he promised to visit him in "Florence, a city I love". And that was exactly it. Jobs' love for Florence was something more than admiration for a splendid city rich in history and art that one must visit at least once in a lifetime on a secular pilgrimage to the origins of Western civilization.
Florence was a major source of inspiration for Steve Jobs' vision and practice. The measure, harmony, balance, in a word, the style and the "great beauty" of Florentine art and craftsmanship are the main ingredients of the products designed over the years by Steve Jobs and his collaborators . Often, in the performances that Jobs put in place in his unrepeatable presentations, Botticelli's "Spring", Brunelleschi's dome or Ghiberti's Baptistery door popped up, all unsurpassed examples of the paradigm of perfection and perfect synthesis between technique and art that Steve Jobs pursued in every detail, even in what was not seen.
“If you are a carpenter you don't stick a sheet of plywood on the back because it doesn't show anyway”.
This was the phrase Jobs repeated to his collaborators who showed him something that didn't live up to his idea of quality, a bar placed quite high where Sergey Bubka was flying. That of the carpenter could have been a reproach coming from the mouth of Leon Battista Alberti or Filippo Brunelleschi. As in the dome of Santa Maria in Fiore there was no masonry in the Mac there shouldn't even be a screw.
Technology as an arm of the liberal arts
This synthesis between technique and art, typical of the approach of the Florentine fifteenth century and which Apple sought and researched in its creations, constitutes one of Jobs's greatest legacies to contemporary industrial and technological culture heading towards the age of cognitive machines. Here are some things said and written by Steve Jobs at different times in his career that prove the roots of this conviction.
Technology and art come together —.
Technology is not enough —.
It is the marriage between technology and the liberal arts, between technology and the humanities that makes the difference —.
Leonardo da Vinci was a great artist and a great scientist. Things weren't unconnected.'
The founder of Polaroid said "I want Polaroid to be at the intersection of art and science." I've never forgotten it.'
If we were to trace the river of Steve Jobs' creativity back to its origin, we would find four sources that feed it: Zen, Buddhism, the Bauhaus and the Florentine fifteenth century. The extreme synthesis of the influence of these four schools on Jobs was the obsessive search for perfection in the simplicity of design, intuitive interface and extreme usability.
None of us have much time to learn how to use a washing machine, telephone or computer.
The stones of Florence
Shortly before being ousted from Apple in 1985, Jobs traveled to Europe with his girlfriend at the time and made Tuscany his main destination. Walter Isaacson, Jobs' official biographer, tells us that in Florence he rented a bicycle and immersed himself in the architecture, craftsmanship and materials of which the city was made. This full immersion not only in the museums and monuments of the Tuscan capital, but also in its urban structure and colours, was a seminal experience destined to leave its mark.
Twenty years later, all the Apple Stores, from New York to Shanghai, will be paved with the same pietra serena that Filippo Brunelleschi, to whom Jobs looked for the spatial conception of Apple stores, used in his masterpieces.
Knowing that it is the same stone as the sidewalks of Florence we are sure that it will stand the test of time,” commented Ron Johnson hired by Jobs to design and develop the Apple Stores.
The cover of Isaacson's biography
A brushstroke of Florentineness is recognizable in the posture of Steve Jobs in the photo on the cover of his official biography written by Isaacson. It is the biographer himself who tells us that Jobs was the author of the cover by choosing every detail from the layout, to the lettering, from the color to the spatial dimension of the various elements that compose it. Well, in one of the 28 niches of the Loggiato degli Uffizi, designed by Vasari for Cosimo I de' Medici to host illustrious Florentines, there is that of Machiavelli who has a face posture identical to that of Jobs on the aforementioned cover. The hand touching the chin to demonstrate Steve Jobs' meditative ability is an almost textual quotation from the Uffizi sculpture depicting Niccolò Machiavelli.
Given the similarity of the two postures, it is difficult to think that Jobs was not inspired by this artifact. Only the position of the fingers changes: Machiavelli touches his chin with his index finger slightly raised, while Jobs rests his thumb on it. Machiavelli's face is slightly tilted downwards to look at the observer who looks up at the statue of the Florentine thinker. Jobs looks straight into the reader's eyes as if he wants to read his thoughts. Machiavelli's tunic encircles his neck exactly as happens with the black crew-neck shirt worn by Jobs and which has become a sort of uniform for the Apple co-founder. Steve Tobak on CBS News also drew similarities between Steve Jobs' vision and some lessons from the Florentine thinker.
Many others have ventured to draw from the analogies between Steve Jobs and Machiavelli identifying in the former a sort of modern prince who does not act on the battlefields but in the globalized economy. These are sterile exercises and we don't even know if Jobs had read The Prince. What is certain is that Machiavelli's Anglo-Saxon vulgate does not suit Steve Jobs, who often operated outside any "reason of state", often in contrast with the market.
The "Florentine" Laurene Powell Jobs
Jobs' wife, Laurene Powell, lived eight months in Florence, learning even a little Italian and above all Florence remained in her heart so much that she called her organic company Terravera, a name that a Florentine "doc" like Matteo Renzi could have coined . It was 1992 and the two were in love, it was the same year of Steve Jobs' fax to the guys from Florence who were trying to bring NeXT to Italy.
That's why “Florence, a city I love”. That's why Jobs could be granted Florentine citizenship, because a piece of Florence lives in Apple.
We'll tell Nardella. Renzi would applaud.
