Bari and Bat, a year as Enterprise Capital: events, schools and the future at the heart of 'ColMare

The programme of activities in Bari and Bat (Barletta, Andria, Trani) 'Capital of Business Culture' by Confindustria 2026 will open on 21 February and close on 1 November. Awarded last November by the president of Confindustria, Emanuele Orsini, the acknowledgement will make the Bari and Bat area the setting for dozens of free events designed to open up and tell the business world to citizens.

Called 'ColMare' not by chance - with a clear reference to the need to recover both the gaps with other European business realities and the relationship with the sea, which has always been an element of growth, identity and expansive capacity of the south-eastern Adriatic throughout the Mediterranean - the programme will open on 21 February at the Kursaal Santalucia theatre in Bari. The evening will also have a special, imaginative title: '2046, the World to Come' with a corollary of questions on the next 20 years of the type:

What will Italia be like in 2026? How will we eat in 2046? How will we protect ourselves? How will we be informed? All questions that look to the future, which is 'the entrepreneurs' time, because the future,' explains Mario Aprile, president of Confindustria Bari and Bat, 'is the dimension in which our projects, our investments, our dreams live, and we want to build it.

After the inaugural evening, which will be opened by Antonio Calabrò, president of Confindustria's Enterprise Culture technical group, as well as by Mario Aprile and Leonardo Patroni Griffi, president of Banca Popolare di Puglia e Basilicata, dozens of meetings and activities will take place in 'La Casa delle Imprese' in Bari's Civic Museum, which will host talks, workshops, project presentations, and where entrepreneurs and citizens can meet and talk.

In short, it will be a 'year of learning', as Silvio Maselli, project leader of the Capital of Enterprise Culture 2026, emphasises. "We want, through business culture, to learn together how to grow in harmony with ecosystems and people, attract capital to create shared value, and improve processes, methods, organisations". The programme has a strong focus on young people - 'to make them fall in love with the manufacturing of our companies,' emphasises Aprile - with about 100 entrepreneurs from Confindustria Bari and BAT who, on 14 April, will make a sort of 'peaceful invasion' in the area's middle schools and will take the chair, to tell young people what it means to do business.