MILAN (ITALPRESS) – Autism or autism spectrum disorder is a neurobiological condition manifested by difficulties in communication, social interaction and repetitive or restricted behaviors. The extent of symptoms is very wide: some individuals present mild difficulties, while others require significant support. The main characteristics of the autistic person are difficulty understanding and responding to the emotions of others and a pronounced sensory sensitivity involving intense reactions to light, sound, smell, and physical contact. Symptoms may appear in the first years of life with difficulty making visual contacts, limited interest in symbolic play, or obvious repetitive behaviors. There are more than 600,000 autistic people in Italy, and almost none are in the workforce. These are some of the issues discussed by Domenico Acampora, an educator and youth policy expert who in 2017 founded PizzAut, the first restaurant in Europe completely run by autistic children, interviewed by Marco Klinger, for medicina Top, a TV format of the Italpress news agency. “The restaurants are two: in 2021 we opened the first in the province of Milan, in 2023 we opened the second in Monza with the great honor of having the President of the Republic at the inauguration.” The motivation behind the project “is very personal: I have a son with autism, when the diagnosis comes the world falls on you and you know there will be no future for your son. I thought of building it for many other kids, not just mine,” also because “in Italy, right now, there are 600,000 autistic people, the Ministry of Health says that an autistic child is born every 77 children. These are frightening numbers,” but “the national health care system passes little or nothing, early diagnosis exists patchily throughout the country, and taking care is very difficult because there are very few neuropsychiatrists.” In addition, of the 600,000 people with autism, “those placed in the workforce are very few and are usually the kids with level 1 autism, the mildest. The kids with level 2 or 3 autism will never enter the world of work: some would struggle tremendously, but others with the right accommodations can do it and yet they remain excluded. PizzAut is proving that it can be done: 41 autistic kids work in my restaurants and many of them have a level 2, some a level 3,” he explained. “The work is very powerful, it gives very high motivation: there are kids who used to struggle to speak and today they relate to customers.” In 2024, Acampora gave a speech at the UN. “I wanted to quote the words of President of the Republic Mattarella who said ‘In the smiles and in the work of the PizzAut boys I found the values of the Italian Constitution, they are a group of dreamers.” These are “extraordinary words,” like those spoken by Pope Francis who, “when we went to cook for him, said ‘You are showing that the disabled person can be the Good Samaritan, which is a simple and revolutionary phrase.” PizzAut also cooked in Brussels for the European Parliament. “More than 6 million people with autism live in Europe, yet there is no European framework law. We hope that politics will take a greater and more effective interest in autism,” but the results achieved so far are “important especially for the kids who improve, who have jobs and are no longer a social cost, but become a resource,” he stressed. PizzAut placed third among Italian restaurants and first among pizzerias, according to rankings compiled by The Fork. “Never would I have expected these results and this interest, it’s an important result because we are telling other companies that if our pizzerias and restaurants do well, they too can hire autistic people and make them work well in their own companies.” For the future, “we have come up with a project called ‘Pizza Autobus,’ truck food to give jobs to other autistic kids on which five autistic kids can work: we would like to make 15, one for each province in Lombardy: it means 75 jobs in Lombardy alone.” The goal is then to get to “one truck food for each Italian province” to get to “500 jobs for autistic people: there is nothing like this in the world, it is a difficult challenge, but we want to face it together with those companies that want to be close to us on this path.”
– photo taken from Top Medicine video -(ITALPRESS).
