Reconsidering campanilismo: a Stanford lesson for Italy

Italians know about campanili. For centuries, the bell tower has been the symbol of local identity—the thing you defend, the thing you measure yourself against the next town by. Campanilismo is usually translated as parochialism: the stubborn loyalty to your own piazza, your own dialect, your own way of doing things. Sociologists treat it as a problem. Economists blame it for fragmentation. Political scientists see it as the reason Italy can never quite get its act together.

But here’s a thought: what if campanilismo isn’t the disease? What if it’s just been pointed in the wrong direction?

I’ve spent the better part of my twenties shuttling between Italy and California, and I’ve come to believe that our common understanding of Silicon Valley is unhelpfully framed. We look at it as a textbook case study for ecosystem building. But the most interesting lesson lies elsewhere: in Stanford itself, and its transformation in just a few decades from a respectable regional university to a world-class research institution.

The man who engineered that transformation called his strategy “steeples of excellence.” The word caught my attention when I first encountered it in the archives. Steeples. Campanili. Frederick Terman was building bell towers—just not the kind that keep you looking inward.

In 2013, I landed in San Francisco for the first time. It was my first trip outside Europe, my first time in the United States. I had no data connection, unconfident English, and a pile of printed reservations and Google Maps directions—the textual kind, turn-by-turn on A4 paper—to an Airbnb in Palo Alto.

This was, in retrospect, the right way to encounter the place.

Highway 280—the scenic route, which I took by accident—winds through golden hills that wouldn’t look out of place in Tuscany. Without a screen to mediate the experience, I had to actually look. Before I’d spoken to a single person or visited a single campus, I understood something important: this was a place, not just an idea. It had topography, climate, a particular quality of light.

I’ve kept coming back. Like many, I felt drawn to the place. But while everyone around me was rightfully focused on the next thing—or looking to plug into such a dynamic environment—my quest was different. Why—and how—did this place get started?

Last fall, I decided to pursue that question properly, as a researcher. I spent a week in the Stanford University archives, reading the letters and speeches of Frederick Terman—the dean who engineered that transformation. What I found was the story of a university that decided to stop being provincial. It changed how I think about Italy.

A talent who came back

Terman was born in Indiana but raised on the Stanford campus, where his father was a professor. He studied engineering at Stanford—at the time a university with a decent regional reputation, nested between orchards, with no advanced industries nearby. He then flew east to MIT for his doctorate in electrical engineering, and stayed to run Harvard’s prestigious Radio Research Laboratory during the war. After learning how a world-class research university was actually run, he decided to come back home and apply the lesson.

This is the part that resonates most for anyone thinking about Italy’s future. Terman was a talent who could have stayed in Boston. The professional opportunities were better. The institutions were more prestigious. The intellectual density was incomparably higher. But he chose to return to a place most East Coast academics considered a backwater—and to build something there.

Stanford in the 1940s was in a situation that recalls the one Italian universities face today. Terman’s letters about the “real brain drain” he was confronting could be written by any concerned Italian professor. His best students kept leaving. They’d graduate, look around for work, find nothing suitable, and take the train east to where the real jobs were.

“Most of them never came back,” he recalled. He judged this unacceptable.

So how did he reverse the trend?

First, let’s be honest about what he had going for him. The Cold War was beginning. The American government was about to pour unprecedented sums into scientific research, and much of it would flow through universities. Terman positioned Stanford to catch that wave brilliantly—but he didn’t create the wave. He was also working within a private university, with a land endowment and light political oversight. When he wanted to lease parcels to industry or restructure a department, he had room to maneuver.

These advantages were real, but they don’t explain everything. Being an American private university in the midst of the Cold War was a condition shared by many institutions across the country—yet there’s only one Stanford. The differentiator was Terman: an inspired administrator with an original philosophy of what a university should be for.

Steeples of excellence

That philosophy was counterintuitive. When resources are scarce, the instinct is to spread them evenly—a little for everyone, fairness above all. Terman did the opposite.

He called his approach “steeples of excellence.” The idea was simple: don’t aim to be fairly good at everything. Concentrate resources ruthlessly in a few important areas, and build the highest possible peak in each. A few steeples that are very, very high provide far more distinction than a large number of moderately high ones.

Campanili, in other words. But campanili that rise above the landscape rather than walling it off.

The logic was brutal but clear. An electrical engineering department with five good researchers all specializing in one important area—solid-state electronics, say, or control systems—will contribute more than a department with five equally good researchers scattered across five different fashionable fields. The latter arrangement, in which individuals work without close colleagues, adds up to very little. The former can produce something extraordinary.

When forming a track team, Terman liked to say, you don’t recruit two men who can jump three feet. You recruit one man who can jump six.

This meant being ruthless about mediocrity. “The most expensive faculty member,” he warned, “is the one who is merely adequate. The university may save a little on his salary, but it loses in every other way—the quality of education provided and of graduate students attracted, in the stature of his department, in the amount of support attracted through grants, contracts, and gifts, and in the ability to attract other excellent faculty.”

Excellence attracts excellence. Mediocrity compounds itself.

But Terman understood something else: a campanile standing alone is just a monument. What he built was a community.

He didn’t ask the government for a policy. He didn’t commission a study on “innovation ecosystems.” He built things. Programs that connected Stanford students to local firms. A research park that brought companies onto university land. Networks that kept engineers in the region even when the salaries were lower than what they’d earn in Boston.

The result was what Terman called a “community of technical scholars”—not the university alone, not industry alone, but a dense network of interaction between the two. Faculty who consulted with local companies. Company engineers who enrolled in part-time degrees. Research that fed directly into products. Products that fed back into research questions.

In such an environment, he wrote, faculty “live in no ivory tower; they have numerous contacts with stimulating, highly creative, and active men in industry.” The ferment was continuous. Ideas moved freely between campus and company. The best people wanted to stay because the conversation was good.

Brilliant then. Brilliant now.

What Stanford can teach ourselves

Of course, there are limits to what travels. Terman himself consulted for regions across America and Asia—Texas, New Jersey, South Korea—with mixed results. Silicon Valley and Stanford grew up together over decades, each shaping the other in ways that can’t be engineered from a standing start. Regional systems are path-dependent. They require not just programs and parks, but firms that actually want to engage. You can’t simply decide to be Stanford.

All true. And yet.

The question is not whether Italy can replicate the conditions of 1950s California. It cannot. The question is whether the logic—concentration over diffusion, agency over adaptation, the ruthless pursuit of excellence in a few areas rather than adequacy in many—can be applied within different constraints.

I think it can. The obstacles are real, but they are also, in part, alibis.

Here’s where campanilismo could become an asset rather than a liability.

Italy already has the regional pride. It already has the fierce local identities, the conviction that our way of doing things is distinctive and worth preserving. More than that: Italy already has proof that campanilismo can compete globally. We call them “valleys”—packaging in Bologna, leather in Tuscany, sportswear in Montebelluna, wool in Biella. These industrial districts turned regional specialisation into world-beating competitive advantage decades ago. The model works. The instinct is sound.

What’s missing is the rest of the ecosystem. Italian firms learned to build global steeples out of regional roots. Italian universities, for the most part, did not follow. They remained generalist institutions, spreading resources thin, disconnected from the industrial fabric around them. The community of technical scholars that Terman built at Stanford—faculty consulting with local firms, company engineers earning degrees, research flowing into products—never fully materialized in Italy’s valleys.

The opportunity now is to complete the picture. Not to replicate Silicon Valley, but to lift Italian universities into the same competitive logic that our industrial districts already mastered. Imagine a Veneto where the university becomes a magnet for advanced manufacturing researchers from Munich and Seoul. An Emilia-Romagna where food technology labs attract talent and investment from around the world, not just local firms. A Piedmont where materials science draws doctoral students from MIT and Tsinghua. Regions that don’t just export products, but import ideas, talent, capital—and keep them.

The Italian instinct is to ask what policy could fix this. A new funding program. A tax incentive. An “innovation hub” with good aesthetics and legendary parties.

But the Terman lesson is different. The university itself has to decide to be an agent of regional transformation rather than a passive recipient of whatever resources trickle down. To build the community rather than wait for one to emerge. To concentrate rather than diffuse.

This requires something we haven’t yet proven we’re capable of: the willingness to say no. To admit that you cannot be excellent at everything. To invest heavily in a few areas and let others wither.

In 1968, Terman addressed a room of Taiwanese engineers grappling with their own exodus of talent. He told them: “It took a long time to bring about this result, and many of us in education and industry worked very hard for many years. But the point is that we have shown that the brain drain can be reversed.”

Taiwan listened. Within two decades it had built ITRI, the Hsinchu Science Park, and the foundations of a semiconductor industry that now shapes global supply chains. They didn’t copy Silicon Valley. They studied its logic, applied it to their own conditions, and built their own steeples.

Italy has many things Terman started with. Research traditions. Physical assets. A young generation that—despite everything—still believes in the possibility of building something here. And something Terman didn’t have: industrial districts that already proved regional specialization can compete at a global scale.

What’s missing is a coherent proposition—the whole regional system speaking to the world, with steeples rising from universities as high and as outward-oriented as those already rising from factories.

What if campanilismo was never the problem? What if we’ve just been treating our campanili as walls instead of towers?

M.M. · First published in The Great Transformation, 2026.01.20.