I grew up in Rome in the Colle Oppio neighborhood, near the Colosseum and two steps from Nero's villa. "I don't want this to be a cause for alarm or for the firefighters to have to be notified."
Lorenzo Di Pietro jokes from his office as general director of Barcelona Activa, a position to which he accepted this week, after a long journey that began in 2000 as an intern and that now culminates after more than two decades, until reaching the most top of this institution. “When I started I didn't think this would happen one day, far from it,” he confesses.
After finishing his university studies in Economics in Italy, he felt attracted to the public policy sector, which, in his opinion, are more creative tools capable of having a greater impact on the lives of cities and their inhabitants.
He moved to Barcelona for love, to join a Catalan woman who is now his wife and the mother of his son Luca, 9 years old. Once installed, he completed a master's degree at the UPF, which later opened the doors of Barcelona Activa to him.
At the beginning of the century he experienced the profound transformation that the city experienced. “Barcelona reminded me of the Rome of my childhood, with its shops, its close relationships in the neighborhood. But the rise since then has been brutal and very fast,” she recalls.
Barcelona, in parallel (and thanks to) the development of Barcelona Activa, has become one of the preferred places to create startups, attract digital nomads and work talent. In his opinion, this development model does not have to come at the expense of the industrial sector, but rather they can (and should) coexist. “Even when these companies end up being sold to funds or other multinationals, we must not forget that the ecosystem that is created around startups makes a qualitative leap for cities.”
But do Barcelonans have the ambition to create companies or do they just want to assist in the creation of others' companies? “Today young people no longer aspire to be civil servants, as they used to appear in the surveys. They aspire to be owners of their time. And this is good for entrepreneurship,” she assures. For Di Pietro, just like what happens in other Mediterranean cities, there is a cultural problem about the fear of failure and the possibility of having second chances. “The fear of not taking risks in business creation has a social cost greater than what an individual business error can entail,” he emphasizes.
Under his mandate, pending the approval of the municipal plan, Barcelona Activa will continue to deepen its lines of action: digitalization (such as the Deep Tech incubator), training (the IT Academy, for programmers, or the Porta 22 center, for career orientation ), financing (with a budget of 10 million euros) and public-private collaboration. “We act as a filter for those who come with a business project. The first thing we look at is if it is viable. Screening the projects also represents important social savings,” she explains.
During his time in Barcelona he has passed through several mayors, but Lorenzo Di Pietro defends that Barcelona Activa has never stopped being what it is and fulfilling one of its main missions: that the private feels valued by the public. In his two decades, he mentions two figures who marked his beginnings: the former president of Barcelona Activa Maravillas Rojo and Mateu Hernández, manager of Barcelona Global for years.
He speaks impeccable Catalan and is perfectly integrated into the city of Barcelona. He claims that sometimes he even forgets that he is Italian. “I don't rule out returning to Rome one day. But you know better than me: it is an ideal city to go as a tourist, then, after a few days, it becomes tiresome to stay there on a daily basis,” he assesses. “Rome is a city with an infinite number of defects. But he doesn't have any complex. Barcelona, on the other hand, is full of virtues. And it would be nice if he loosened his complexions a little.”
