The idea of creating a network that connects Calabrians around the world was born in November 2018 from the discussions of speakers who came to Reggio Calabria to teach in a Medical Genetics course focused on a group of genetic diseases which are more frequent in Greek Calabria than in others parts of Italy (called Primary Immuno Deficiencies = IDP).
Subsequent meetings and discussions were also held in Reggio with many participants (including non-doctors), some of whom were skype-connected such as Prof. Franco Marincola from Menlo Park (California) and Prof. Antonio Condino-Neto from San Paolo in Brazil.
The reflections of Prof. Domenico Minuto (Reggio Cal.) perfectly summarized the meaning of the founding meeting of 18 July 2019.
The Covid 19 pandemic that broke out at the beginning of 2020 slowed down the implementation of the project and the launching of this website which in the meantime has been enriched with new projects.
The meeting of 18.07.19 of the Calabri Vagantes in Reggio was full of testimonies that aroused many reflections in me.
I would like to indicate here some of them, not because I believe they are important but because they represent a contribution to the debate.
The very happy idea of contacting expert professionals around the world, Calabrian by birth and affection, to make them talk to each other and with us residing in Calabria, can achieve profoundly profitable results.
The first result is obvious, that is the celebration of love for the motherland that produces not only nostalgia, but art, literature and new wisdom.
Another result is the possibility of using the international expertise of these professionals as a consultants to address both personal and collective problems of those who reside in the motherland.
The fact that for the time being the contacts will take place in the medical field, given the professional commitment of those who conceived the idea of the Calabri Vagantes, makes this opportunity particularly requested and appreciated.
Its benefits, however, can be extended to all professional fields in order to rejuvenate the ideas and knowledge of resident professionals, help them to appear on a global panorama and also positively transform the assessments that we residents have of the society in which we live.
And here I am faced with the forecast of a third result, which I believe is particularly important and essential.
I believe that we Calabrians have inherited from a centuries-old experience a mentality of service, apart from the Albanians of Calabria who have preserved the pride of a heroic population.
This mentality makes us not a true society of citizens, but rather a mass of subjects.
The ruling classes of this mass, that is the powerful on duty, from barons to bureaucrats to mafia, and today, above all, professionals and politicians, are the exemplary teachers and leaders of the classes that are subordinate due to lack of knowledge and social prestige.
If the guides preach honesty, even if they do not practice it, the subordinate classes respect honesty, as the history of our people attests, at least as long as its cultural tradition was enforced.
If, as is the case today, guides immerse themselves in the gray zone of collusion with anything that is morally detestable, this behavior spreads like a social plague.
But the professionals who have established themselves for their intellectual abilities all over the world, offer a great example of professional integrity and can therefore, with their prestige, contribute to purifying Calabrian society from the many evils that today make it detestable in many ways and to spread once again in the soul of the Calabrians who long for honesty, frankness and industriousness that confirmed our most genuine popular tradition and today seems frighteningly clouded.
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Domenico Minuto