Francesca’s Tegamini
To tell the story of Francesca Crescentini, a Piacenza native with two Bocconi degrees (first CLEACC and then ACME), it is worth starting with the advice that – at the end of a very long chat – she felt like giving to young women and men who aspire to carve out a place for themselves in social media. “Merely having a life is not a kind of content and should not be considered as such,” she warns in a clear reference to the way of doing of those who, having gotten a certain amount of ‘notoriety’ from an early afternoon or prime time TV program, believe that their personal image is enough to communicate something. And she adds: “You learn social media by working on it, it’s true, but you have to do it by posing yourself a thousand questions, by paying great attention to the context and always remembering that you have a great responsibility towards your audience. Above all, a basic ethical approach must not be lacking, because it allows you to steer clear of difficulties.”
As for content, Francesca’s blog, Tegamini (an Italian word meaning small frying pans), twice winner of the Macchianera Award and listed on the 10 most influential literary blogs by the Il Sole 24 Ore financial daily, offers a plethora of it. From literary reviews to personal diary entries, from interviews with authors and editors to stories on fashion, travel and cinema. All well-ordered, each story fried in its own little pan. Awards aside, since her university days, Tegamini has been a way for Francesca to talk about herself: “I’ve always had a passion for writing and I’ve always kept pseudo-diaries,” she says. “Tegamini was
born in 2010 as a way to find people who shared my interests.” When the blog emerged from anonymity, being exposed to success was not always easy: “It can be either extremely traumatic or extremely encouraging,” explains Francesca. “Usually, it means continuously shifting from one sensation to the other. Also, at the beginning of the social media era, everything was much more playful, now the architecture of algorithms rewards polarization. Those who know how to ‘trigger’ others are favored.”
Francesca has a passion for reading and writing, of course, but also a decade of experience as a translator from English to Italian (with nearly 60 references on her CV). “It’s a self-taught skill that I started to learn when I was little when, thanks to a father well versed in technology, very early on I had access to online sources for what interested me, sources that were often in English. I continued with years of studying the language to deepen my knowledge of it.” Then she came to professional translation “for one of those lucky intersections that have marked my life a bit,” she says. After graduating from Bocconi and after a few years working in marketing at Einaudi – “where I had started in quantitative marketing and then moved to the editorial side, both for sell-in and sell-out” – she got a call from a former colleague who had moved to another publishing group. “She needed a reader and I needed to make a little extra,” she explains, recounting the two years in which, in parallel with her job at Einaudi, she was a freelancer reading and summarizing manuscripts. Until she was given her first translation, after which she never stopped.
In 2014 she left publishing and moved on to the world of digital communication, still in the early stages of the social media era. “Having my blog, I thought this was an interesting world to dive into. For ‘We Are Social’ I worked as a copywriter for two years – a rather generic job description, because I dealt with all kinds of different things, from
editor to curator to defining brand communication strategies – but in the end I understood that the context of media agency work wasn’t for me and I simply didn’t return to the office after my maternity leave.”
Since 2016, Francesca has therefore been a “full-time content creator and translator.” Having always lived surrounded by books, but also being deeply immersed in the life of the web, she can afford a bit of criticism of the bigoted boomers in the industry: "Social media are giving space to market niches that are growing and need to be taken seriously. On the web you often see snobbish and paternalistic attitudes towards young people: we pass judgment on what they read, while we should remember that it doesn't matter how and what they read, but that the spark of reading is lit."
