Have you seen the Third Paradise symbol on your Valsaar sneakers, but aren't sure what it means? It's hard not to notice it on the front label of the eco-sneakers created in Biella to support the reconstruction of the Cervo Valley. The Third Paradise is a symbol conceived by artist Michelangelo Pistoletto. The Maestro, who has his Cittadellarte Foundation in Biella, created it to graphically represent a new social dimension, in which the relationship between men, women, and nature returns to the harmony necessary to build a viable future.

The symbol is a reworking of the mathematical symbol for infinity, where a third is added to the two circles of the original symbol. The two outer circles represent all the diversity and contradictions, such as that between Nature and artifice, while the inner circle is the interpenetration of opposites, the representation of the womb that will give birth to a new humanity.

Pistoletto describes his work as a "fusion between the first and second paradises," where the first represents the time when "human beings were totally integrated with nature," while the second is the phase of humanity characterized by an "artificial" reality. In the Second Paradise, artificial needs, products, comforts, and pleasures developed by human intelligence exist, giving rise to an "artificial world that, with exponential progression, generates, alongside its beneficial effects, irreversible processes of degradation and consumption of the natural world." The Third Paradise is therefore a new phase of humanity, "which is realized in the balanced connection between artifice and nature," the artist explained. A positive vision of the future, therefore, but also a warning and a reminder: human civilization must "re-form the principles and ethical behaviors that guide common life," Pistoletto continued, otherwise its very survival is at risk, and to do so, each of us must "assume personal responsibility within the global vision."