Job Digital Lab with ING Italia: a digital tourism project developed with StartUp Lab
“I participated in the StartUp Lab to understand how to develop my idea of digital tourism,” explains Beatrice Rapaccini, aerospace engineer, mathematics professor, co-founder of the Fabriano Maker Space and facilitator at the Learning Creative Learning Community. Beatrice participated in the Job Digital Lab – Training to Get Back in Action course dedicated to women to give a concrete shape to her new project.
“The course activated my energies. I was able to focus on the project and understand how to develop it. Now, I just need to find someone who wants to do it with me …”
With the help of Nicoletta Vulpetti, a true lover of identity stories, the second edition of Job Digital Lab, the educational programme developed with ING Italia, presents the stories of the protagonists of personal and community change.
Beatrice has been more active than Charles was in France.
In short, this is who I am.
It all started in Terni and then continued in Milan, Toulouse, Ancona, Modena, Jesi, Fabriano and now Älmhult, in Sweden, where IKEA started out.
I’m never a long-term planner. I can never answer a typical question like “what do you expect to achieve in 5 years?” All I can see is the present.
I have always pursued the most uncomfortable route. I’m attracted by complex situations, those that test us, but without any delirium of omnipotence. I have always been guided by curiosity and the desire to understand myself, the people and places I have visited. I began exploring at 16, when I joined a multigenerational volunteer group for the safeguard of Castelvecchio di San Gimignano, an abandoned medieval site.
Then came university: aeronautical engineering in Milan. My tutor was Amalia Ercoli Finzi, the first Italian woman to become an aerospace engineer and an extraordinary person who guided me in my first adventure: an Erasmus in Toulouse, when hardly anyone knew about the Erasmus Programme.
I still remember the telephonic appointments with my parents and boyfriend. There were no cell phones around at that time.
Then, came a job, a family with my boyfriend-come-husband (also an aeronautic engineer) and three children, all on the move.
Wherever we were, we also tried to join civil society. In Modena, we founded a Waldorf School. In Fabriano, in 2013, we started one of the first Maker Spaces in the public library, where children, young men and women, adults and senior citizens could experiment with new technology.
At a certain point, I decided to change my professional career. Helping children with issues after school, I decided to become a teacher and dropped everything I had been doing.
While I was pregnant with my third child, I decided to get a specialisation degree in education. Then, I worked as a Mathematics professor for 14 years – the best job in the world – until in 2017 we moved to Sweden for my husband’s job.
Now, I’m on the move again. I participated in the Start Up Lab to understand how to develop my idea. I would like to network people, associations and museums in Italy with the corresponding organisations in Scandinavian countries through a digital tourism project.
It's a spark, but the course activated my energy. I was able to focus on the project and understand how to develop it. Now, I just need to find someone who wants to do it with me, because I have learned that I do not like to do anything on my own. The only way for me is to work together, otherwise what’s the sense?
