On the occasion of the fifth edition of the National Conference “United for Legality”, promoted by the National Union of Young Chartered Accountants and Accounting Experts (UNGDCEC), the Trame ETS Foundation was awarded the “United for Legality” Award 2025, a national recognition assigned to realities engaged in the enhancement of the assets confiscated from the mafias and in the promotion of concrete paths of legality.
For the first time hosted in Calabria, the conference took place in Cittanova (RC), in the presence of representatives of the institutions, the professional world and the third sector. To receive the prize, on behalf of the Foundation, was President Nuccio Iovene, who spoke as part of the session dedicated to the cultural impact on the territory through the social reuse of the confiscated assets.
In particular, the Trame ETS Foundation has been recognized as a virtuous example of cultural enhancement of the confiscated heritage, for having been able to transform the wounds left by crime into tools of knowledge, art and civil participation.
The occasion of this recognition was born in particular from the experience of the exhibition “Civic visions – the art returned”, curated by prof. Lorenzo Canova and promoted by the Trame Foundation together with the Metamorphosis Association, with the patronage of the Ministry of the Interior. The exhibition, inaugurated on June 18, 2024 as part of the thirteenth edition of the Trame Festival of books on the mafias, has exhibited to the public works of art confiscated with exponents of organized crime, so far, partly, which remained invisible.
Among the pieces on display, authentic masterpieces seized from two emblematic figures of the Italian underworld – the boss Gioacchino Campolo, known as “The King of Videopoker”, and Gennaro Mokbel, involved in scandals related to the Banda della Magliana. These are works by great masters of the twentieth century such as Giorgio De Chirico, Antonio Ligabue, Michele Cascella, Marco Lodola, Franz Borghese, up to emblematic cases such as the false attribution of a painting to Giorgio Morandi, which testifies to the paradox of crime also as the victim of his scam logic.
The civic visions exhibition was created by the Trame Foundation with the support of the CDP Foundation, in collaboration with the Metamorphosis Association and with the patronage of the Ministry of the Interior.
The initiative has strongly shown how art can become a powerful instrument of redemption and testimony: a stolen heritage that returns to being a common good, made accessible to the community through culture. A true “symbolic return”, which has imposed itself as a national model of civil and cultural reuse of confiscated assets.
During the Conference of Cittanova, the contribution of the Trame Foundation was indicated as a study case, as part of a wider reflection on the strategic role of professionals – accountants, accounting experts, public administrators – in the long and delicate path that leads from the confiscation of an asset to its return to the community. The recognition received confirms how central the synergy between institutions, third sector entities and local communities is to give concreteness to the principles of legality and social justice.
The Trame Foundation, with over ten years of commitment to Lamezia Terme and Calabria, thus confirms its vocation to make memory, art and cultural activism a concrete lever to build a future free from the mafias.