Dear dromers,

the day has come, and it tastes like something new and necessary: ​​the new DROME website is online!

The online DROME is a platform that generates precious impulses and that is created to offer a continuum between the paper magazine, the projects and the events that we plan and support, and the many inspirations with which we are invested every day, whether they are thematic or not. Behind all this, there is a passionate team, composite, flexible, untiring and constantly growing. As for the paper magazine, we won’t be running short of fascinating writers for our remembered pieces, and these will include contributors who have already occupied a room, guests, first fruits to discover, critics, journalists, famous bloggers passing by…

But one thing at a time. Many of you have probably already read, reread and shared DROME magazine, so for you it’s clear why it cannot be a magazine made of poplar and ink. We are under the spell of the rotary printing machine: we do not believe in the announced death of printed media, we try to demonstrate, issue after issue, that the possibility of having longer texts and of sharing in the best possible way the images we choose with so much care has its best on the paper. However, the pages are never enough, it is well known. The events that we take care of and that play with and among the arts and that often lead us to conquer unexpected universes of meanings, of undesignated places and of uncustomary faunae, have become the hallmark of DROME, so that today we are also a creative studio with wonderful projects. Now all this is also sovereignly on the web. It already was since the beginning, of course, but not in this way. With these seven years of experience in a magazine that has been a forerunner, bouncing all over the globe, without ever ceasing to be independent and, if possible, by radicalizing its “integrity and visions” attitude, the web does not want and cannot be just a place that is nice to see, a place where one gathers information about DROME and some careful reports that help one to orientate in the composite galaxy of contemporary cultural productions. Here we are speaking of something else: a place of culture, style, divertissement and discovery that is both specular and independent from the paper magazine, and is flexible and friendly, because it is constantly growing up. It will be a place where it is possible to tell, to analyze, to dissect, to confront, to get lost and to find oneself, then to get lost again.

The new website will allow us to offer a distillation of the input that we receive for each issue, as in the directory called THEMATIC PILLS. These are pieces written specifically with the aim of nurturing our investigations on the back issues by proposing new topics and observations. DROME ON PAPER is there to give you a chance to read or reread a selection of feature articles published in the printed magazine, some of which are present in terms of textual or visual extras. But this, which could seem a lot already, you can imagine that no, it is not enough. The DROMELAND section, with all its non-thematic columns – such as TRACKLIST for music; FRESH INK for books; ASK THE DUST on what needs to be recovered; MEMENTO for events; DIGITALVIDEODROME for the latest releases on DVD; up to the witty observations of the social phenomena of this world, SYNDROME – they are all here. And some new creatures will be here too, and you will discover them day by day.
And if for once you will find typos and small imperfections, be indulgent: it’s all amazingly in progress, but we’re going to fail better!

Yours faithfully,

Rosanna Gangemi
Editor-in-chief DROME magazine

13.12.2011