Expo 2030, Massolo: “Challenge and opportunity for Rome and Italy ”

A challenge and an opportunity not only for the capital but for all of Italy. Thus Ambassador Giampiero Massolo, president of the Expo Roma 2030 Promoting Committee, spoke to the Adnkronos about Rome’s candidacy to host the Expo, just before leaving for Paris where the first general assembly of the Bureau international des Expositions will be held tomorrow ( Bie) of 2022, which will be attended by 170 member countries. The final vote is expected in November 2023. “It is a great challenge for Rome where a great unifying event has been missing for some time, Expo has all the conditions to be so, and it is a great challenge not only for the capital but for all of Italy because, like the other nominations, the organization of such a large-scale event is never just for a city but for an entire country. After all, that’s what our competing cities and states are doing – Massolo reiterated – so Saudi Arabia with Riyadh, South Korea with Busan, while given the very particular situation in Ukraine, Odessa’s candidacy is, for now, formally suspended, so tomorrow there will be no presentation: we will see what the developments of the situation in the country “. Expo 2030, explained Massolo, is a broad, complex challenge that involves a whole country, but also a huge opportunity because it involves welcoming an impressive flow of visitors, we estimate about 30 million people in six months. and it is a question of providing for them and for the countries that represent opportunities on the economic level, on the tourism level, on the level of major works, which will have to be taken on the fly if Rome wins the Expo. So from this moment on we can no longer make mistakes, we have to play this very demanding game but Rome has all the credentials to win it “. Massolo then highlighted how” unlike the 2025 Jubilee, this too is of enormous significance from the point of view of its symbolic, spiritual consistency, and from the point of view of what it represents for the city in terms of infrastructure, funding, for Expo 2030 there are votes and ballots. Now ours is a phase of very intense electoral campaign that we are basically conducting in the name of inclusion, so that all the countries participating in the exhibition can recognize themselves in this Expo dedicated to urban regeneration, the improvement of relations between territories and people, which is one of the development objectives of the Millennium Development Goals “. The proposal is that of an Expo that is different from the others, inclusive and sharing.” We are not doing an expo to illustrate not just a city or individuals, we are proposing an expo that offers the world the opportunity to exhibit, to come and show the best the world has to offer in the sector of development relations, between people and territories – concluded Massolo – and we do it in an inclusive way by offering future countries participants of common projects, to be done together between now and 2030, and then come and show these achievements made by common understanding between Italy and the individual countries. It will be the expo of freedom, of young people, of women, of the joy of living that cannot but accompany us and of which we really want to make a distinctive feature of our expo, even with respect to our competitors “. (By Giselda Curzi)