«Emozioni never leaves you indifferent»

Some projects are born from a precise strategy. And then there are others that seem to emerge slowly, almost without their creators being able to fully understand them.

When Emozioni was born in 2018, it was not yet a magazine in the sense we know today. It was not born as a cultural manifesto. It was not born as an identity project.

It was born for practical reasons.

Marco Silvio Jäggi tells it with disarming sincerity:

I had started a family. I wanted to live in my own territory. I could no longer keep flying between continents.

For years he had worked in international consulting, moving through very different companies, organisations, and contexts. Then something changes. Or perhaps, more precisely, something begins to slowly surface.

A question.

"What will I be when I grow up?"

He smiles as he tells it, but behind that phrase you sense something far deeper than a simple professional transition.

From there begins a path that moves through marketing, applied psychology, organisational wellbeing and human relationships. And almost without noticing, Marco finds himself drawing closer to a territory he would probably have considered distant only a few years before.

The territory of emotions.

"It was one drop at a time"

Marco never speaks of sudden illuminations.

There is no heroic moment. There is no grand narrative turning point.

He speaks instead of progressive openings.

Books read at the right moment. People met along the way. Mistakes. Relationships lived badly. Awarenesses that arrived slowly.

It was one drop at a time.

Then come some readings on emotional intelligence and flow. And something truly changes.

If we are unaware of them, they act upon us.

He pauses.

It is no longer us who act. There is the emotion that activates us.

In telling it there is no tone of someone who has found a fascinating theory. It sounds more like the account of someone who began to see their own life, relationships, work, even their own failures, in a different way.

Because the point, he says, was not to understand others.

It was to understand himself.

The invisible wound

At a certain point in the conversation the tone shifts.

Marco speaks about his own generation. About an upbringing in which emotion and vulnerability were often perceived as weakness.

I come from a generation where, from an early age, you were told: don't act like a crybaby.

He laughs as he says it. But immediately after he turns serious.

Emotions didn't count. What counted was rationality.

Then he adds something that hangs suspended in the room for a few seconds.

Discovering that it wasn't so... was like breaking through the vault of the sky.

Perhaps it is here too that Emozioni truly begins. Not from an editorial strategy.

But from a fracture.

From the moment a person starts to notice that an entire part of human experience exists that they had learned to ignore.

«I am a mirror»

Throughout the interview, words surface repeatedly that Marco seems to instinctively reject.

Guru. Master. Expert.

He does not recognise himself in any of them.

At one point he uses instead an image that returns several times during the conversation.

People already have everything inside them. All I do is mirror back what they have, allow them to see themselves.

It's probably one of the most important points for understanding the tone Emozioni has taken on over the years.

The magazine rarely tries to explain to people how to live. It does not offer formulas. It does not build ideological identities.

Rather, it opens spaces.

Don't offer solutions — open doors.

The return home

When the word "home" comes up, something changes in Marco's face.

He is genuinely moved.

That word moves me.

But the home he speaks of is not geographical. It is not the place where you live.

Home is being complete, finally.

Then he adds something that runs silently through the entire interview.

It is a home I think I will reach only at the end of my life. I won't even say probably — for certain.

In that moment it becomes clear that Emozioni is not only a magazine about emotional intelligence.

It is also the human attempt to draw closer, step by step, to something more authentic.

When the project becomes bigger than you

At first, Marco recounts, Emozioni was a kind of house organ. But he's quick to clarify that he felt it as something bigger almost immediately.

Then slowly something happens that he himself did not expect.

People begin to keep the copies. To underline them. To reread them months later. To give them as gifts. To write to the editorial team.

Emozioni never leaves you indifferent.

After Covid, he says, something even deeper happens.

People became attached. Not just readers. Advertisers too.

He pauses.

I never felt it as mine. I always felt it as something bigger, except perhaps in the first three issues.

And he adds that the project carried a message capable of transcending the value of copy numbers and readership.

And it is perhaps there that Emozioni definitively stops being only a magazine.

It becomes a shared place.

The real price

From the outside, Emozioni can look like an elegant, slow, almost natural cultural project.

But during the conversation another dimension also emerges: the dimension of exhaustion.

Not the romantic kind. The real kind.

The nights.

The doubts.

The fear of failing to keep what was promised.

There were sleepless nights when I thought: can I still manage to publish it?

Then the thought runs immediately to subscribers, to advertisers, to the people who believed in the project.

I won't be able to keep going. Now I have to give the money back to subscribers and advertisers.

He smiles as he tells it, but not enough to hide how real this responsibility is.

If I promise something, I keep it.

And immediately after comes a phrase that seems to explain far more than the project itself.

Letting someone down would be a personal disintegration.

"When I send the issue to print, I am moved"

There is one passage of the interview that perhaps more than any other conveys the emotional relationship Marco has with the project.

He speaks about the moment when an issue is closed and sent to the printer.

He smiles. Then lowers his gaze slightly.

When I press send to deliver the PDFs to the printer, I am moved.

Pause.

It is as if another baby had been born.

He says it without rhetoric. Almost with wonder.

And perhaps that is precisely what strikes you most during the conversation: the fact that after years, exhaustion, sleepless nights and constant doubts, that emotion is still alive.

Paper, images, and traces that remain

Over time Emozioni has begun to open up to new digital paths as well. But when talking about paper, Marco often returns to the concrete experience of reading: the gesture of turning pages, underlining, stopping on a page, finding a phrase again months later.

The paper must be tear-proof.

Then he laughs.

I am the first to be moved. Even reading what I write myself. It is almost madness.

The same applies to the images in the magazine.

For Marco they must not simply be "beautiful".

They must leave something.

They must provoke.

He recalls a war photograph, technically imperfect but emotionally overwhelming.

It's better than an article against war. It makes everything clear.

Voices, before roles

One of the most striking aspects of listening to him talk about Emozioni concerns the way he chooses the people and stories to welcome into the magazine.

He does not look for status. He does not look for formal authority.

I was convinced they had something important to say, regardless of their qualifications or profession.

And he recounts having met along the way very different people: professionals, artists, former soldiers, mediators, people with fragile or irregular paths, but capable of bringing an authentic gaze to human experience.

Because, in the end, that is what he continues to look for.

Not perfection.

Presence.

"I am a wanderer"

Towards the end of the meeting, Marco returns to an image that seems to tell something deep about him.

I am a wanderer.

Not a keeper. Not someone who has arrived at the destination.

Rather a person who moves through experiences, collects questions, and continues to ask them along the way.

Then, speaking of the younger generations, something in his tone changes again.

It becomes more luminous.

I have great faith in young people.

And immediately after he adds a phrase that seems to hold the deepest meaning of Emozioni itself.

They will have the ability to transform chronos time, the time that passes, into kairos: the time worth living, the moment you're truly in.

Perhaps that is also why Emozioni continues to exist.

Not because it offers easy answers. Not because it teaches you how to live.

But because, issue after issue, it continues to create a rare space: a place where people can stop long enough to listen to what is moving inside them.