Time to build like Italians again: a call for a new Italy and a new Europe.
Drive almost anywhere in Italy, and at some point you end up on a road the Romans paved.
It still works. Nobody finds that strange, which is more or less the whole problem with the country in one sentence.
We are surrounded by proof that we once built things meant to outlast empires, and we have quietly convinced ourselves it was someone else, a long time ago, nothing to do with us.
It was us
Volta built the first battery, which is why the charge in your phone is measured in his name.
Marconi worked out how to push a human voice across the ocean with no wire, which is the entire idea your phone is built on.
Federico Faggin, from Vicenza, drew the first commercial microprocessor by hand. Every computer, every server, every model you have ever spoken to goes back to a chip a man from the Veneto designed.
Fermi opened the nuclear age.
Galileo more or less invented the habit of checking whether a thing is true by actually looking.
We did all of that. And then we stopped.
Then we stopped
I cannot tell you the year. There was no announcement. But somewhere along the way this country, and most of Europe with it, accepted a new arrangement without ever voting on it.
The future is something the Americans and a couple of Asian companies make, and we buy it, and we feel sophisticated about choosing which one.
More than eighty percent of the digital products and services we use are not ours. The hardware, the cloud, the data centres, the models. We own none of the layers that matter. We pay rent on them.
With AI this stops being an abstract complaint.
Everything that will run the next forty years is being built on infrastructure no European controls, can audit, or could rebuild if it were switched off tomorrow.
We are betting the whole continent on tools we are not even allowed to look inside.
Coming from the people who used to hand the rest of the world its breakthroughs, I find that embarrassing.
The barrier is gone
For most of the last century, building real technology took a corporation, a factory, a war chest, and permission from someone above you. That is the part nearly everyone still believes, and it is the part that quietly stopped being true.
A handful of people with laptops and open models can now build things that used to need a thousand engineers and a state standing behind them.
The wall that kept ordinary builders out has mostly come down. We just have not noticed yet, or we have decided it does not apply to us. It applies to us.
So I started a community
So I would rather do something than keep writing posts about the decline.
A week ago I put up a single post on X and called it Italian Builders.
A lot of people turned up who had clearly been waiting for someone to say the obvious thing out loud: that the complaining is finished and building is the only move left.
There is a Telegram group, and it is private on purpose. You get in one of two ways.
You ask me directly for access, or someone already inside vouches for you and sends you an invite. I am keeping it small and a little hard to enter because I want builders in there, not an audience.
We build in the open
The community does more than talk. Its core work, the reason it exists, is building open source software together. One project at a time, out in public, so anyone can see it, read it, and improve it.
The idea is simple. We take the pieces of digital infrastructure Italy depends on and does not own, and we rebuild them ourselves as open source, so they belong to all of us instead of to a company on another continent.
Why open, and not some closed national champion handed to one firm by a ministry. Because keeping knowledge open is the most European instinct there is, even if the Americans run it better than us right now.
Every cathedral, every theorem, every map this continent produced was knowledge written down so the next person could go further than you did. Galileo published so other people could argue with him and check his work. That habit is a large part of what made Europe Europe in the first place.
We are never going to out-spend Silicon Valley. We can absolutely out-build it in the open, if enough of us decide to. We have already started. The first project is in the legal sector, opening up Italian law and public legal data that is technically public and useless in practice. After that, the next one, and the one after that.
This is the call
So here is the part where I actually ask you for something.
If you are an engineer, a researcher, a founder, a student, someone inside an institution, or anyone who builds something real, this is aimed at you. If you are Italian, or you simply want Europe to find its nerve again, we want you in the room.
You did not inherit a museum to walk through on Sundays. You inherited unfinished work, and it has your name on it. The same name as Volta and Marconi and Faggin, whether that feels comfortable or not. They did their part. The only honest question left is what you do with yours.
We are going to take the boring, critical pieces this country runs on and rebuild them in the open, one at a time, until the word sovereignty means something you can run on a server instead of something a politician says on a stage.
Most of this work is slow and unglamorous, which is the whole reason it is still sitting there, waiting for someone to do it.
Italy made the modern world once. No law of physics says we only get to do it once.
From Italy. For Italy. For Europe.
We have started. Come build with us, or ask someone inside for the door.