And innovation: the capacity to "engineer challenges" is the link that bonds all the region's elements of excellence, melding products, entrepreneurs, ideas, skills and values.
Tradition and innovation are the strength of a region with a local heart and a global brain, where age-old flavours live in perfect equilibrium alongside high tech. Let's look at this balance. The region is first and foremost a "factory of stability", that has shown how it can develop its own economy not only in car production but also around the engineering industry, textiles, food, chemicals, aerospace and IT: this leadership has over time built up its industrial credibility and acted as a launching pad for the development of financial and service industries. This is the reason behind a greatly diversified economy in constant contact with the international markets (goods and services are exported every year for 31,000 million Euros), thanks also to a highly integrated transport system. But this equilibrium must be dynamic: Piedmont is also the "factory of innovation". With a gross domestic product of over 100 billion Euros (8.7% of Italian GDP), 1.3 billion Euros is invested every year in research and development (16% of all Italian investment). This means that Piedmont creates one twelfth of national wealth and one sixth of "innovative thinking". This innovation is seen in one hundred research and development laboratories, a system of Science Parks linked with the industrial districts, three universities, the new "Università del Gusto" and the growing cinema hub.
Finally, Piedmont is the "factory of pleasure". The land of wine and fine cuisine, of Barolo and truffles, knows how to treat its guests well: from the finest fabrics to luxury jewellery, from Baroque marvels to the lakes that enchanted Dickens and the mountains that the world will come to know in a few years when its peaks will host the 20th Olympic Winter Games in 2006. To crown all this is culture, art and architecture that only a region that has written the history of Europe can offer: Baroque, art nouveau, the sumptuous royal residences of the House of Savoy, the palaces and castles that have been declared a world heritage site by Unesco, the abbeys, Guarini's chapel that hosts the Holy Shroud are just some examples of a region where even the smallest town has an extraordinary history to tell. The fulcrum of all this is Torino: a city that is changing thanks to the work of world-renowned architects like Renzo Piano, Arata Isozaki and Gae Aulenti. The city of the world's second Egyptian Museum, Leonardo da Vinci's "Autoritratto a Sanguigna" and "Ritratto di Ignoto" by Antonello da Messina, the National Museum of Cinema, and the Gallery of Modern Art.
Art, nature and fine food. This is Piedmont. Welcome.