Pilot project presentations: Stendhapp – the app inspired by the Stendhal syndrome

Speakers meeting link: https://bit.ly/36uVRwF | Meeting attendants: Facebook live at https://www.facebook.com/designscapesproject/

17:30-17:45 Welcome and introduction
(Besnik Mehmeti, ANCI Toscana)
17:45-18:15 Presentation of the pilot project
(Francesca De Finis)
18:15-18:30 Q&A and Discussion
18:30 End

Our speakers

Besnik Mehmeti has a distinguished expertise and a winning track record in securing and managing EU funded projects. He provides strategic advisory and funding opportunities to local and regional administrators, communities and businesses. His core areas are the promotion of innovation, technological development, entrepreneurship, creative and cultural industries. His ability to master complex and multilateral partnerships and initiatives led to the successful development and implementation of several innovative actions and partnerships at local and regional level.

Francesca De Finis. Master of Science in Chemical Engineering followed by 25+ years’ international experience in Innovation, Marketing and Communication in FMCG leading Companies, she then moved into strategic and innovation consultancy. Constantly engaged in pro bono activities, such as co-founder of Associazione Media Montessori that designed and developed the first experiment of a public Montessori school for kids 11 to 14 years old in Milan. Co-Founder and volunteer tour guide for GiraNolo, a non-profit collective that organizes walks to discover the neighborhood where she was born. Young female managers mentor for Valore D and active member of Rena. In the attempt of balancing Heaven and Earth, in her free time Francesca practices yoga and rugby and spends time with her family and her dog, Molly. She’s convinced that mapping Beauty and making it available to everybody will make the world a bit better.

Stendhapp – the app inspired by the Stendhal syndrome – is an Italian non profit startup founded by an only-women team.

Our mission is to make people aware of hidden Beauty around them, starting from the Italian territory. In order to do so, we are building a digital platform that, aggregating open and closed data, collects and makes available a huge quantity of information about the cultural and artistic heritage of Italy.

We use digital media to increase the awareness of the enormous cultural and artistic heritage distributed on the territory, to better connect with the younger and to stimulate the proximity tourism through geolocalization.

Stendhapp encourages the community of users to actively contribute to the platform content, leveraging the collective genius to nurture the database. We are committed to generating a positive impact on the communities that identify themselves with their culture and the increase of the satisfaction of living in their territories.

Experiencing Beauty has a positive effect on people’s wellbeing: “The experience of Beauty has the extraordinary power of making us happy, stimulating intelligence, and changing the perception we have of ourselves and of the entire world. It’s available to everybody as Beauty can be found everywhere.”- Piero Ferrucci “La Bellezza e l’anima”.

Working with potential early adopters, we have dedicated a lot of energy in finding a definition for Beauty in connection with the Italian territory: the result of the investigation is that the Beauty of Italy is a wide concept that can be described by 15 different categories: museums, churches, monuments, buildings, archeological areas, art, music, theatre, UNESCO sites, literature, history, nature, food, wines, festivals.

From the beginning of our project we always placed a lot of attention to the accessibility to physically disabled people. In fact, the information about accessibility of most sites is unavailable or not precise, as the experience of Beauty for a physically disabled person may be significantly worse due to architectural barriers. We plan to activate the community to add qualified information to as many sites as possible.

In the current post pandemic context, we see an opportunity to partner with cultural operators to promote the fruition of art and culture after the lockdown period.

For more info please visit: www.stendhapp.com. The app is available on App store, Play Store and at the address app.stendhapp.com.