SELINUNTE’S ACADEMY
1000 BEATS is organised by SELINUNTE’S ACADEMY© an innovative project with the aim of creating jobs combining tourism and culture.
The project stems from the awareness that Italy is an extraordinary country: because it has a rich heritage; because it is the first nation in the world to hold UNESCO sites; because it has a unique geographic position with a temperate Mediterranean climate and an extremely varied terrain; because it is recognised everywhere as a land of excellent food, tradition and culture.
However, it is not enough to have a large number of monumental and cultural sites to automatically attract tourists. Suffice to say that in 2015, while Europe hosted around half of the 1.183 billion global tourists (source World Tourism Organisation, UNWTO, United nations 2016 report), Italy only attracted 55 million.
SELINUNTE’S ACADEMY© works in the gap between cultural heritage and tourist attraction, producing successful cultural events in the music, visual arts, sport and academic excellence fields. In each project we are committed to building an attractive offer which would support a healthy balance of income and expenses and not on public contributions.
SELINUNTE’S ACADEMY© consists of professionals, friends, institutional and business partners, that promote the national heritage, certain that by combining 50% of natural heritage and history with 50% of human knowledge and expertise, the Italian cultural tourism would again become a unique world masterpiece.
STAFF
LUCA BRUNO
Co-founder
Contemporary classical percussionist, he has collaborated with many orchestras and ensembles such as Drumhead percussion and the Lugano Percussion Group, with which he has completed many tours and collaborations, like the famous Martha Argerich Project. Since 2007, he has joined the “Orchestra della Svizzera Italiana” as an extra percussionist and is also a teacher at the school of music and the pre-professional section of the “Conservatorio della Svizzera Italiana”.
EMMANUEL PARTIGNO
Co-founder
He acts as the chief executive of international trade machinery in the construction industry in collaboration with Caterpillar, one of the 30 American companies on the Dow Jones Index. In his working career he has bought and sold all over the world for a value above 100 million dollars. Graduate in History and Philosophy with his thesis in “The cultural industry”, he has attended the Entertainment Management course at the Luiss University in Rome.
OSCAR PIZZO
Artistic Director
Pianist (his group Alter Ego), he has played in the biggest theatres and concert institutions, recorded for the major world radio and won awards overseas. He has been in charge of Contemporanea, the only season of contemporary music in Italy, at the Auditorium Parco della Musica in Rome. Here he creates unique and spectacular events, just think of the four helicopters used in 2009 for the Italian premiere of Stockhausen’s Helicopter string quartet, “one of the most difficult in the world due to technical difficulties. Recently appointed Knight of Arts and Letters in France, Pizzo with Carlo Fuortes, of the Musica per Roma Foundation, was appointed as an adviser to the Petruzzelli of Bari, he renewed the entire orchestra that today includes “the only case in Italy, a choir and an orchestra with an average of 26 years”. From 2014 to 2018 he was Artist Director at Teatro Massimo in Palermo.