What Would Make It Easier to Build in Cagliari? One Room Is About to Find Out.
On a September Thursday, in a pub near the harbour, a few dozen people will split into groups of three and try to answer a deceptively simple question about our city. It's the 35th time the same community has gathered — and this month it's turning lived experience into a blueprint.
What: EMC 35th Meetup — Monthly Mixer
When: Thursday 24 September 2026, 19:00–22:00
Where: The Londoner English Pub, Cagliari
Price: Free — but places are limited (21 left at the time of writing)
Book: emcagliari.com
There's a particular kind of conversation that tends to happen among people who have lived somewhere else and come home. It usually starts with a small complaint and a comparison — in Berlin this took ten minutes, in Lisbon there was a place for exactly this — and it ends, if you're lucky, in something more useful than nostalgia: an idea. A thing that worked over there and might, with a little effort, work here too.
On Thursday 24 September, a whole room in Cagliari is going to have that conversation on purpose.
Thirty-five gatherings in
The occasion is the 35th meetup of Entrepreneurs Meet Cagliari — EMC — the grassroots community that has spent the last few years quietly convening the city's founders, freelancers, makers and merely-curious in a rotating cast of venues around town. This month the setting is The Londoner English Pub; the format is the community's monthly mixer; and the entry price, as usual, is nothing but your willingness to show up.
Thirty-five is a number worth pausing on. Communities are easy to start and famously hard to keep. That EMC has reached its 35th edition says something about a hunger this city has had for a while — for a space where building a business is treated as a human pursuit rather than a purely bureaucratic one.
The premise: import the best of everywhere else
What makes this particular evening interesting is that it isn't a talk. There's no speaker, no slides, no expert dispensing wisdom from a stage. Instead, the room splits into small groups of three, and each group is asked to choose one thing they'd bring to Cagliari — a service, a policy, a piece of everyday infrastructure, a cultural habit — that would make it easier to start, run or grow a company here.
Then they interrogate it, honestly: What is it? Where have you seen it work? How would it actually help local companies? And the question that separates a wish from a plan — what would we need to make it happen here?
The groups pool their answers, the strongest ideas are gathered up, and — this is the part that lifts it above a pleasant evening of shop-talk — they become contributions to EMC's forthcoming annual report. In other words, the grumbles and the good ideas don't evaporate with the last round. They get written down, and pointed at the future.
Why this belongs on our pages
Readers of this magazine know we tend to celebrate the city's spikes — the festival that fills a piazza, the summit that flies investors in from Silicon Valley. This is the quieter, more durable thing that sits underneath all of that: the ordinary, monthly, unglamorous work of people deciding that the place they live could be a little better to build in, and then actually comparing notes on how.
There's a modesty to it that's easy to underrate. The organisers are explicit that the goal isn't a perfect solution — it's useful, realistic ideas, drawn from people who have seen how things are done elsewhere and want the good parts here. The community's own manifesto puts it plainly: business should be human, not just transactional; community is a multiplier of opportunities; sharing what works — and what doesn't — makes everyone stronger; and the future of Cagliari is something we can actively shape together.
You don't have to be running a company to take part. Founders, freelancers, employees, aspiring entrepreneurs and the simply curious are all welcome — which is rather the point. A better city to build in isn't designed by a committee of experts. It's argued into being, three people at a time, over a drink.
Good people, good ideas, and — as the community likes to sign off — paradise. Thursday, 19:00, The Londoner. Book before the last few seats go.
