Cristiano Bottone

Cristiano Bottone, class ’67, cofounder in 2008 of the first Italian Transition Initiative in Monteveglio (near Bologna). In the same year he brings together, with another group of national experimenters, Transition Italia, which is now the national hub of the movement. Much of his work focuses now on the involvement of municipalities, businesses and institutions in the Transition process. He still does not know if Transition is really the way to solve the enormous problems we have created, but experiencing it is one of the most interesting and fun things that ever happened to him.

Current Job: Full time transitionist (I’d like to say Systemic Transition Processes Specialist)

Previous experiences: before Transition

More than 20 years in the communication and marketing field, started from the bottom (graphic designer) to the top (creative director of my own advertising agency with 11 people). This means I’ve been an employee, a free lance and an entrepreneur (and this teaches a lot).

I worked for small, medium, big companies and institutions. Particularly with banks including 4 years of communication activity for the Italian Banks Associations (ABI) on the introduction of the Euro in Italy: that’s was very important to understand how our systems really work, illuminating.

Previous experiences: after Transition

“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe…” therefore from 2005 I started a search for solutions knowing that most of what we “sell” as solutions within this system are quite useless. It took me 3 years to discover what Rob and the other were trying in Totnes, and that was my tipping point. Transition was worth a try.

So I progressively moved my professional activity toward Transition, trying to move with me everything connected (family, clients – yes banks also – people…). With many others we founded Transition Italia and Monteveglio Città di Transizione and helped the Italian Transition network to develop and connect around the country (I became a trainer, a facilitator a speaker and so on…).

Part of this involved from the early stage the partnership with municipalities (Monteveglio was the first public strategic agreement we did) and when ANCI (Italian Association of Municipalities) spotted what we were doing we started working together.

So far we used every possible tool available, from crowdfunding to European Projects, we did research (with universities, consultants, institutions like ISPRA,  developed policies, helped to write laws and statutes, and I personally helped a little at international level when possible (activities in Bruxelles, hubs WGs, hubs national meetings…).

At the same time we did a lot of field experiments working bottom up to se what happens when you help people to project and organize within a Transition framework.

Latest developments

Transition in Italy is now respected and trusted, we have a strong credibility where they know our work. We are trying the scaling up connecting with the highest levels of politics to test what is possible (and each new week we have new possibilities).

Encouraging and fun, see what happens…