Infrastructures are not enough for the digital revolution, although they are fundamental and must be quickly adapted, but skills are needed. For this Tim, even before Covid, had launched the “Digital Risorgimento” operation: a tour (first physical, then virtual) throughout Italy to bring citizens closer to digital education. A mission that would mainly fall to the public sector, but in which a large technology company like Tim wanted to make its contribution. The next step involves the partnership with an important public entity: Rai. In fact, Tim and Rai will launch a docu-series on the "digital risorgimento of Italians" in the autumn: eight stories (which Tim is still looking for, there are two weeks to contact the company and propose themselves) which will tell of Italians who have not used digital only to survive but also to improve and reinvent itself.
“We needed the leap in quality – he commented Tim's president Salvatore Rossi – and the best partner could only be Rai, already the star of a memorable literacy campaign in the 50s, in the literal sense of the term. Now the new alphabet is digital and is as basic as the alphabet we all know. The spirit of the "Risorgimento Digitale" initiative is to ascertain how far behind the Italian population is in the knowledge of minimum digital skills: we are 25th out of 27 European countries. We said to ourselves: how can we raise this level? With a spirit I would dare to say heroic before the pandemic we thought of sending trucks around Italy in medium-sized Italian cities, parking them in the central square and offering advice, courses, information, to any citizen. In many cases it was a question of explaining the rudiments, starting with how to use computers: many do not know this. The idea was to go to the squares and offer them for free and without commercial implications. We had left from Sicily (12 stops, already 8.000 people reached in person), then as soon as we landed in Calabria the pandemic began".
However, the virtual tour that continued in 2020 also paid off, as Rossi recalled again: “We continued with the virtual tour and it was productive. We have even had more success than with the physical initiative, the numbers prove it: over 1 million Italians were involved”. And many more will be involved in the docu-series in the autumn: the goal is to reach both a young audience, through the streaming of Rai Play, and the more traditional audience, the television one. The message is one we have heard several times in recent months: transform the emergency into an opportunity. Many Italians are not making it, but some are and Tim and Rai would like to tell those stories, the stories of distance learning where it has worked, the stories of doctors, nurses, traders, artisans. "The stories of those 10 million Italians - added Riccardo Luna, project coordinator, citing Censis data - who have done something digital for the first time in their lives since the beginning of the pandemic".
