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About us - our story
Our project, founded by Bernard Anson Silj, began in 1999 with cultural tourism ("Belvedere Italia"), inspired by the Grand Tour, the great love story with Italy, the search for memory and cultural roots and the completion of any proper education, since Renaissance times.
But, in the last ten years, our world, our society and its ecosystem were sending out signals of serious deterioration. In 2005 Bernard Anson published the storytelling novel Carmen Via, Journey in the songlines of Italy (Semar Press) in which he investigated the relationship between story, memory, habitat and place. For sure, the values of the old Grand Tour were no longer sustainable: the primacy of culture over nature, of bedlam over quiet and Man as the measure of all things.
"For the entire history of landscape in the west is indeed a mindless race towards a machine driven universe, uncomplicated by myth, metaphor and allegory, where measurement, not memory, is the absolute arbiter of value..." (Simon Schama / Landscapes of Memory).
But, in the meanwhile, the tourist-leisure business was mutating, way beyond its traditional search for pleasure, well-being, and even culture, materializing a real flight from frenzy and folly (new meaning of the words di-version and re-creation ?), as a veritable quest for new mental and physical space and a quality time. In so doing, it was becoming the world's largest industry. That says it all.
Storygardenz began in Italy. Its founding places, RVS-Rome and Bel Poggiolo-Umbria belong to Bernard Anson himself, and his wife Eleonora, and have been developed as cultural, social and economic prototypes for this new kind of tourism, of quality time, expanding beyond its classical matrix - but forever in touch with it - towards other landscapes, other cultures and other stories, with a growing network of people, places and organizations.
In 2009, we began to put these resources onto a MAP: the Map of Imagination.