those who know me well also know my passion for maps and topography.

when i was a child, i used to spend hours in reading atlases. whether it was italy or the world atlas, i often started to wander through lands and villages and imagine how those places could be. i really liked political maps, and the clarity of those lines and colours that allowed me to classify the world, and to play by guessing capitals and flag colours.

however, there was a part of the world which always ended up puzzling me. if you looked at its map, what you saw was a web of enclaves and unreasonable boundaries, sometimes solid, mostly dotted, filled up with confusing hues, diagonal stripped patterns and names sometimes in capital letters, sometimes in lower case, sometimes in cursive, without any perceivable order or reason.

and so i was always wondering, "ok, but is bophuthatswana actually a nation? and if so, why doesn't it appear in the list of african countries in the next page of the atlas? and how can it be a nation, if its territory looks like a set of random stains on a towel?".

without knowing, i had accidentally stumbled onto the apartheid.

on saturday, when icann's public forum in cape town was about to end, i was sitting in the front rows wondering what to do. i had already taken the floor so many times, but i'd really have liked to share with the audience the fact that, after all, cape town, the mother city, was no common place.

when i was a kid, it was already clear that something really wrong was going on down there. i was attending high school when the plastic optimism and the glittering reaganomics of the eighties gradually gave way to the unquietness and disillusion of the nineties - and cocky hard rock heroes such as bon jovi and axl rose had to make room for kurt cobain. but for me, this all started with my new membership in amnesty international and crowds in a stadium shouting "set mandela free".

we didn't rejoice too much for the fall of communism - when you are eighteen and naive, communism usually looks like the right solution, and yes, most of us from a red manifacturing town like turin, disliking the cia-supported, mafia-connected and corrupt christian democratic party in power in italy since 1948, actually liked the soviets more than the americans - but the fall of apartheid marked the sign of a sudden change; it was the proof that history is not just something you study, but also something you live in, and perhaps even help making.

and especially, it was the proof that, if you really believe, things may change for the better.

this is why, the other day, i wanted to express my joy for being able to be in a town which was once known as a centre of segregation, injustice and violation of human rights, and to debate freely, among people from all parts of the world, how to make the internet better for everyone.

in the end, i was too shy and did not take the microphone. also, i thought that someone from icann would have mentioned this in the closing remarks and in the usual thanks to the local organizers.

i was instead surprised and disappointed when i realized that this had not happened. now i really regret not having shared some of these considerations with the rest of the participants. i regret this even more after having seen, the following day, a really inspirational exhibition at the former slave lodge - perhaps the most thought-provoking exhibition i have ever visited.

i think that there is a reason why icann travels all around the world, and should continue to do so. the reason is that whenever people get accustomed to a specific environment - be it los angeles or geneva - their ability to see things from another point of view starts to fade.

thus, by visiting different places (and actually going beyond the doors of the five stars hotels) we are allowed to watch different peoples and cultures, and to try to figure out what would be good for them too.

what the internet needs is not a system where one point of view prevails over the others, but a system where the necessary amount of coordination is put in place to allow that everyone has the same opportunities to use the network for the purpose he/she likes more.

by understanding the changes that global flows of information and action brought to some parts of the world, we should better understand how important it is to preserve the possibility to use the information society tools as a way of empowering the unempowered, and changing the world for the better.