My name is Gianmarco Senna. I am from Milan and I run businesses. I open up in the morning, I sign the contracts, I pay the wages. I sign, so I answer for it.

I started behind the counter, in a sports goods shop belonging to one side of my family. Shopkeepers, not merchants: I prefer the smaller word because it is the truer one, and because it says something precise, that the person behind the counter owns the place.

Since 2001 I have opened more than twenty businesses. Today I run a traditional Milanese trattoria, Bela Tusa, and a cocktail bar, Tusa Isola, both in the Isola district of Milan.

They did not all go well, and the reason was almost never the one people expect. They were not bad businesses: they were business models that changed at some point, and we did not adapt fast enough. The market had already moved and we were still good at doing the previous thing. That is the lesson I have carried since, and I would not have learned it by reading it somewhere: formats come and go, tradition always pays. Not because it is comfortable, but because it is the one thing you never have to chase.

I spent a few years working abroad, not travelling: I kept myself with bar and waiting work, alongside people who had arrived from all over the world. Outside the comfortable settings of home nobody knows you and nobody owes you anything: you are worth what you do every day. That is where I learned my English, a rough version of it, but it gets me through anywhere. And I understood that the way we do things here is a way, not the way.

Running a business also means spending part of every week inside procedures nobody has ever had an interest in simplifying: portals that do not talk to each other, forms asking for data the state already holds, obligations that exist only because nobody ever deleted them.

Then I ended up on the other side of the counter. In 2011 I was elected in the district where I grew up, in 2018 to the regional council of Lombardy, and for five years I chaired its committee on business and enterprise. I went in convinced I already knew how it worked. What I learned instead is that the machine is not malicious: it is slow by construction, and the people working inside it suffer it as much as the people banging on it from outside. Holding both of those together changes the way you read a rule.

That is where this blog comes from.

I write about red tape, enterprise, tax, artificial intelligence and self-government. And about politics, because politics has to be something you can discuss: real analysis, without dogma and without positions decided in advance. I always start from a fact rather than a principle, and every number carries its source. What you will not find is the tone of someone who has worked it all out while everyone else has not, because people who disagree with me are almost always looking at a real problem from another angle.

One long piece and one short piece a week, in Italian and in English.

If you want to write to me, the address is scrivi@gianmarcosenna.it. I read everything, and I reply when I have something to say.