150 YEARS SINCE THE ITALIAN UNIFICATION

On 17th March the celebrations for the Italian unification will start and Torino , the first Italian capital, is getting ready to live a year of unforgettable celebrations. The Comitato Italia 150 is organising everything and the event will be called "Esperienza Italia".
To know the celebration programme beforehand you can look up the website www.italia150.it.
One of the main centres of Esperienza Italia will be a place unknown to many people and called O.G.R. (Officine Grandi Riparazioni). Very near the Politecnico of Turin. Here also the workshops for the students coming from every part of Italy will take place.

THE OGR: Officine Grandi Riparazioni

It is worth discovering some curiosities about the place that will be so important for the 150 years of the Italian Unification celebrations.

This place was actually a huge garage where locomotives and railway carriages were repaired and assembled, and, after closing in the 70s, it hasn't been used anymore for 30 years. In order to make you understand the importance thiis factory had it might be interesting and useful to know what it looked like and what it was used for. Well: this building has an "H" form structure and it is located between corso Castelfidardo and via Borsellino, in the area between corso Peschiera and corso Vittorio Emanuele II, next to the campus of the Politecnico citadel. It was built at the end of the 19th Century and it is formed by two big parallel buildings with a smaller connecting one, each of them divided into naves. The working pavilions were independent from each other. The train to be repaired arrived on the tracks that were placed across the structure: it took several phases to repair it, for each of them it was moved. Looking at it as a whole, this structure looks gigantic and anyone who has a look or pays a complete visit is really amazed. We took such a visit and, although we didn't expect it, the building really surprised us!

When we arrived we were surprised by the majesty of the building and we thought that such an immensity was really suitable to satisfy the needs of celebrations as important as those for the 150 year Italian Unification! This is one of the main centres, together with Venaria Royal palace: an excellent way for using this structure again. Now it is your turn. Go there and discover a new available area of the city.

THE EVENTS FOR 150 YEARS CELEBRATION

The OGR will host different initiatives for 150 year celebrations. Workshops and exhibitions, in particular they will tell young people the sense and beauty of these 150 years and what Italians were, are, and will be able to give in the future.

Making italians
The exhibition "Making Italians" will tell the 150 years of our history and will make the moments of integration live again, but also the moment of crisis that have made the Italians more and more united. There will be, in fact, photos and films, rooms only devoted to in-depth thematic studies, and, the icing on the cake, everything will be set up in a multimedia and interactive area, with particularly suggestive sets that will bring the history on stage and that will make us all fell protagonists. Thanks to this exposition you will go back in time, you will learn about our country's past thanks to new technologies, you will discover unknown social and economical themes and moreover, it will be an opportunity to meet other young people coming from every part of Italy and exchange opinions and ideas with them.

Future, creativity and innovation
From March to November 2011, the exhibition "Future, creativity and innovation" will be set up. It wants to represent a journey of human intelligence by means of physical, mental and cultural track. This exhibition has the aim of making young people understand that nobody can put limits to our creativity and curiosity concerning the future. The programme is organised following some guided tracks and it is built with 7 big areas, each of them will be devoted to a central theme concerning the future in Italy.

These are the themes:
1. How we will live: centred on resources, from house to energy, and on the challenge of a new environmental project;
2.How we will move: to think again about the means and potentiality of transport that has always determined changes of the place where people live;
3. How we will eat: to understand the difference between nature and sophistication in food;
4. How we will work: to think about future relations and about a life rich of surprises and comparisons;
5. How we will communicate: to understand how much our language changes day by day and to get used to technologies and innovations;
6. How we will cure: to know the new medicine; in short, a look at the future to know and imagine how our life will be;
7. How we will think: to face the great themes of the future by a reflection and the widest possible vision, that focuses on a responsible and curious ethic.

THREE BIG REPAIRS FOR THE TURIN OF THE FUTURE

Idea workshop run with ITC R. Luxemburg students
According to OGM, big repairs concerned trains.Wagons and locomotives that needed to be repaired in order to work better and make travelling more pleasant for Turinese people. However, what are, instead, the big alterations that Turin needs, to work better and improve the quality of life of its citizens?

Here are some suggestions. Let's start by reflecting about values such as citizenship, sustainability and democracy that are the leitmotiv to the 150 years of the Italian Unification celebrations.

1) Citizenship
A weekly lesson of Intercultural subjects taught at school
Damage: the citizenship, that should have a fundamental role in our daily life is often a mirage for young foreign people. This is a very common problem in modern society: often young Italians feel superior to their foreign counterparts, provoking both moral and physical damage to them.
Great repairs: what can we do to improve this situation? We must compare the young Italians' ideas with those of young foreigners in order to understand how each group feels. We think it would be a good idea to have a weekly lesson at school dedicated to the discussion of intercultural subjects for solving some conflicts. Besides, to prevent uncivil behaviour some internal fines could be introduced so that anybody causing either physical or moral violence pays the consequences.

2) Sustainability
The rechargeable bus ticket
Damage: hey girls and boys, don't you think there's too much pollution in Turin? Using our cars is very polluting and also creates problems about the viability which in a big city like Turin is not a minor issue.
Great repairs: to incentivate everybody to use the bus and to pay for the ticket, what do you think about a rechargeable magnetic bus card which is calculated either by time or by distance? When you get on and off, you swipe your card through the machine and pay according to time or distance at your choice.And what do you say about offering people who have received fines when driving, the choice of either paying them or spending some time cleaning the city buses?

3) Democracy
Printing rights for young people
Damage: even if Italy is a democratic country, some human rights like those of printing, speaking, thinking can be in danger. This could be one of the reason why young people have taken a distance from politics and current affairs.
Great repairs:A solution could be publishing in an important newspaper some articles written by young people expressing their thoughts and ideas. They could also write a magazine to be freely distributed outside schools, where their ideas could be confronted with a more simple and young language: to do this it would be necessary to put together young people of different political ideas, religions and current affairs. It would be even better if this magazine were published in different languages according to the presence of different ethnicities in different schools.