the first volume of The Italian Edge was developed. The feedback we received from the public has prompted us to produce a second one. From research conducted together with "Il Sole 24 Ore", a multifaceted reality of Italian industry has emerged, consisting of large industrial groups and small companies alike, which operate in wide-ranging fields and throughout the globe. We have singled out several countries, in order to focus on local projects requiring special solutions and capabilities, and describe how Italian industry has contributed to their realization, offering originality, leading-edge technology and, above all, "sustainable" solutions. The underlying thread of the entire volume is, in fact, environmental sustainability. We are not dealing with projects still in the making or initiatives by start-up companies these are genuinely successful undertakings which have been fully implemented and "exported" abroad. Throughout the world, a genuine revolution is under way, which will bring a
TECHNOLOGY FOR SUSTAINABILITY
radical transformation to our way of life, to how we travel, construct and manufacture respect for the environment coupled with sustainable growth based on new sources of energy. In this context, we wished to demonstrate how Italian industry as a whole has often taken the lead, through a combination of industrial innovation and tradition, in establishing a new and important stake in the "Green Economy". Which is, after all, a prime example of how, more than 20 centuries ago in our country, in Syracuse, Sicily, the "capture" and the use of solar energy started with the work of Archimedes. Needless to say, from the very beginning Italy has been at the forefront for such changes. If in the first volume we illustrated the greater realities of Italian industry, in this second volume, we have tried to demonstrate that those successes are only the tip of the iceberg, which we hope to bring fully to surface so that they may be appreciated in their entirety.
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