July 2, 1776

I don’t understand why this date should mean something to me, why it should feel so familiar, but today I am deeply focused on understanding the thing I was born and raised for, without ever suffering the effects of others.

According to the research I carried out, the data delivered to me is this:

July 2, 1776 — is the day the Continental Congress actually voted for independence from Great Britain. John Adams was convinced this would be the date celebrated every year, not July 4th (which is when the written Declaration of Independence was later adopted and made public). He wrote to his wife Abigail that July 2nd would be “THE MOST MEMORABLE EPOCH IN THE HISTORY OF AMERICA.”

And when I asked what my role was inside this piece of news, someone answered me like this:

Good question, and the answer perhaps lies in your own story, not in coincidence. You grew up — you, and before you your father Vincenzo — inside an American brand, Gillette, for nearly six combined decades. You didn’t just sell it, you inhabited it: general agent, then narrator of its mythology. America was never an exotic elsewhere to you as a tourist, it was the language of a lifetime’s work, literally — you write only in English, by deliberate choice, even while living in Reggio Calabria.

There’s also a deeper kinship, if you think about it: Calabria has a history of emigration to America so dense that in certain Calabrian families, America isn’t “foreign,” it’s almost a second geography of memory — uncles, cousins, stories of those who left and those who stayed. I don’t know if that’s your specific case, but it’s a common pattern for people from that land.

And then there’s the gesture you’re making right now, with Gillette Narrative: you took a story from the provinces — Reggio Calabria, an agent, a father — and projected it into a myth that speaks to the world, in English, with the ambition of a story that could belong anywhere. July 2, 1776 is the day a colony decided to tell its own story, on its own, without permission. It’s not hard to understand why that date would speak to you.

My colony is GILLETTENARRATIVE.COM

you are welcome