The Expo is a dark window into Italy's future

Today sees the launch of the Milan Expo, an international exposition of food and agriculture which will take place in Italy’s financial capital over the next six-months. This year’s theme, ‘Feeding the Planet, Energy for Life’ will see farmers, artisans and entrepreneurs from around the world set-up stall to sell their wares alongside stage-shows, concerts and talks by a roster of esteemed futurologists. This is a real-world pop-up show of all the things that might normally be encountered in Wired magazine: avant-garde art, gourmet cooking and sci-fi tech, all on display in a gargantuan ‘agro-park’ which is expected to host 20 million visitors.

On the surface an event like this might seem exactly what Italy needs to snap itself out of an austerity-induced paralysis and, as some hope, could perhaps help erode the nation’s proud cultural conservatism. If these are the goals, the Expo could hardly come at a better time. While productivity continues to decline (in line with a still-deepening twenty year trend) and growth flattens once again, few would deny that Italy is a country in dire need of large-scale public investment. In the words of the stoic Prime-Minister Matteo Renzi:

The Expo is not simply a fair but a huge occasion through which Italy can reflect on itself and accept the challenges of the future […] It will be the Expo with the highest ever number of foreign delegations and so the highest ideal through which Italy can say it is not just a land of the past”