New York City hosted the 26th annual Nova Conference, titled "From Italian Roots to Global Scale: Executing Innovation." Nova is a nonprofit that brings together more than 3,000 MBA graduates of Italian origins who studied at top American business schools, the Ivy League chief among them, as well as select European institutions. The organization, which also had the blessing of Nobel laureate economist Franco Modigliani, gathers Italian corporate leadership excellence abroad. 

Over three days, the conference drew prominent figures from business, finance and innovation, most of whom spoke during the full day of programming on Saturday, Nov. 7. After welcoming remarks from Consul General  Giuseppe Pastorelli, the lineup included Andrea Di Camillo of P101; Niccolò Maisto of FACEIT Group; Silvio Palumbo of BCG X; Connor Mullaney of Lingotto; Ubaldo Messia, Nova's Founder; Sergio Marullo of Angelini Pharma; Marco Prono of JPMorgan; Monica Mandelli of KKR; Paolo Battaglia of Lazard; Ivana Semeraro of ICON; Paolo Gallo of Italgas; Sergio Iasi of Maccaferri; Francesco Leone of Alvarez & Marsal; Pierluigi Serlenga of Bain; Marco Argenti of Goldman Sachs; and Andrea Zappia of MCH Group. 

The conference has long served as a meeting point between professionals with decades of experience and young students eager to follow in their footsteps. This year, Italgas CEO Paolo Gallo spoke with La Stampa USA on the sidelines, marking ten years since the company's return to the stock exchange on Nov. 7, 2016.

Italgas now holds 55% of the Italian market and generated about 2.5 billion euros in revenue in 2025, with net income of 674.5 million euros, up 45.7% and 33.1% year-over-year, respectively. Those results accompany a 13-billion-euro investment plan announced this year, running through 2032. 

"Italgas first went public in 1851 on the Turin Stock Exchange, back when Italy did not yet exist as a political entity," Gallo said, describing the company's more recent return to the market as marked by "incredible numbers": market capitalization climbing from "3 to 9 billion," with profit distributions totalling "2.5 billion." At the heart of that trajectory, he said, were "digitalization and innovation." What was once an "extremely traditional company" has "become a benchmark not only in Europe, but worldwide," a shift he said has been noticed abroad as well: "No one has managed to do in our industry what we've succeeded in doing." "The network has become a full-fledged smart digital infrastructure," Gallo continued. "The physical hardware is still there, of course, but today it's equipped with sensors and devices that constantly monitor operations, send data to the control center and, at the same time, receive instructions. Today we know in real time what's happening across the grid." That gives the company an exceptional preventive edge: where crews once intervened only after a problem was reported, "today we can monitor and manage the grid continuously, and far more effectively." 

Italgas has also pushed into artificial intelligence, which Gallo said requires both a "solid digital platform" and a large volume of "high-quality data," groundwork the company began laying back in 2018. "Over the past 12 months, we've developed more than 220 agents operating across our corporate processes," he said, adding that the company was surprised both by how quickly it built them and by how fast they began delivering results, in terms of both "productivity and the service delivered to the end customer." 

Digitalization accounts for a particularly large share of that investment, roughly "a quarter of the 13 billion," Gallo said, especially following the 5.3-billion-euro acquisition of 2i Rete Gas. Another portion is dedicated to "repurposing and modernizing the physical infrastructure." 

Gallo closed on a strategic note, framing Italgas's growth in geopolitical terms: "Italy is proud of what we've done, because we're the only ones in the world to have followed a trajectory this significant." The country, he said, has "gone from being an endpoint of supply to becoming a real transit hub for energy moving from North Africa into Europe [...]. The infrastructure built in recent years wasn't designed solely to meet Italy's domestic demand, but carries broader strategic value and a natural projection toward the European market." 

The day closed with a dinner at Casa Cipriani in Manhattan, where Nova's younger members took the floor. Matilde Iasi, a student at New York University, told the room how important it is "to believe in young people, which is exactly what you've done tonight." Andrea de’ Castiglioni, the 22-year-old Founder of startup Locu AI, spoke next, invoking Mario Draghi's "whatever it takes" to argue that "optimism is not empty idealism." He also pointed to the booming world of live events, the focus of his own venture, as a sign of the times in a digital age. 

The evening closed on that note of generational handoff, with Nova already looking ahead to next year's edition.

La Voce di New York / La Stampa USA