Emanuele Quintarelli is a passionate Italian.  He loves sport cars, Greek philosophy and quantum physics.  He loves his girlfriend Francesca, good food, good wine and he loves living in Rome.  And, of course, he loves all things Enterprise 2.0.

"My passion for technology is not just about technology but also the impact it can have on improving the quality of our lives," he says. He was one of the first Italian geeks to blog in English, but nowadays he does most of his blogging at The Social Enterprise, the first blog on Enterprise 2.0 in Italy, where he covers case studies, market status, adoption patterns and the evolution of the Italian and European market.

Having spent a number of years at Accenture and having worked as the Web 2.0 Research and Development Director at Reed Business Information (Reed Elsevier),  Emanuele has extensive experience doing evangelization, R&D and analysis of innovative Web 2.0 based business models. He is the founder of Facetag, an international research project on the evolution of social tagging systems and of Netwo, the Italian hub for web 2.0 startups.

In his most recent role, he is a partner of Open Knowledge, the first enterprise 2.0 consultancy in Italy.  Although the firm was formed only in January of this year, it already has a prime client roster, including Intesa Sanpaolo (the first bank in Italy), BTicino (international company of the Le Grand Group), Banca Popolare di Vicenza,  KPMG, Watson Wyatt, Cisco Systems, and others.

"What we do is help large clients understand, evaluate, adopt and cultivate participative and bottom-up approaches to improve the bottom line, reduce costs and innovate," he says.  "Most of my time currently is helping companies understand the enormous shifts that Enterprise 2.0 is driving within business organizations, both internally and internally, but especially the path they have to follow to involve their employees in this powerful movement of change."

His current project is organizing--with Open Knowledge and the Università dell'Insubria (University of Varese)-- the International Forum on Enterprise 2.0, the first international conference on the topic, scheduled for June 25.   Details are here.   

"The acceptance of Enterprise 2.0 and social media still has a ways to go in Italy but publishers, media companies and even other industries have stopped to thinking of it as a fad, and companies like Fiat and Ducati are embracing it with exceptional results.  Our mission is to spread the word, frame the discussion in the right direction and help companies to move faster and more effectively."

And, being Italian, Emanuele still manages to find time for fast cars, food, wine and girlfriends.  Sounds like la dolce vita to me.