ada civitani

Our history

Since I was a child, what that I have felt as the most important in life is Love. The big one, which moves mountains and pushes people to improve the world. And already at the age of 6 I was very determined to give my contribution.

During my studies in Pedagogy I fell in love with Montessori thinking. After graduating, during over 20 years I have been involved in education programs carried out in Africa and Latin America, in the field of international cooperation for sustainable development. Travelling, meeting people of different cultures and the educational practice in contexts very far from my birthplace, have opened my mind to dimensions that I could never have learned from books.

When I became a mom, I came back to Italy and I started facing completely different problems: simpler, but not trivial at all. Home-work reconciliation was a daily challenge. I didn’t want to give up being an independent woman, moreover I did my job by vocation, but…in the meanwhile, I absolutely wanted to be there for my little girls, to be a good mother.

As a working mom, time was no longer enough for me. I had to choose if to work, look after the house, or educating my daughters? All things I couldn’t do without, yet one seemed to inevitably exclude the other.

The turning point came precisely from the thing that made me most uncomfortable: coming home in the evening and find the beds unmade, since I had no time to make them up in the morning.

Every evening the sight of that mess made me feel so sick that it seemed that not only my house, but my whole life was slipping away from me.

The change is in the small things

For many years my work drove me far away, alongside the most disadvantaged communities on the planet. The challenges I was used to share with my colleagues were enormous.
Since I became a mom, I started facing new problems and new daily challenges… and I learned that to change the world you don’t necessarily have to go to the other end of the planet.
Sometimes change is in the little things, right in front of you, at the heart of our lives and our homes. Change happens every time we make ourselves capable of stopping for a while, and reflect on what we are doing: perhaps, we could do it differently. Change happens every time we make ourselves capable of transforming a problem into an opportunity, so generating benefits for ourselves, for the others and for the Planet that hosts all of us.

If you want to change the world...start making your bed!

William McRaven wrote it in a best seller translated into over 40 languages. As a mother, I have made it a cornerstone for my personal growth and for the education of my girls.

But together, we have gone further.

With the active collaboration of Camilla and Cecilia, we have invented Zip&Dream. That’s what we did: we have transformed the problem of unmade beds, into an extraordinary opportunity to help families simplifying home management, freeing up time and energy and feel better being together.

At the beginning it was a charming dream. But soon it became a project and with the help of my husband Claudio, professor of Corporate Finance at the University, we converted the dream into a small enterprise, oriented at innovating teh commercial offer for families, while generating regular and decent work for women and girls.

Thus New Fairy was born. It is a special enterprise, because through its products it tells a fairy tale that takes place in everyday life. Inspired by the thought of Maria Montessori, it combines Innovation, Ethics and a pinch of Magic, to transform the daily needs of families into opportunities to grow together.