The faces that remain when the engines fall silent

© Photo 2026: Alex Photo

Reflections from Ducati’s Centenary – Misano, WDW2026

There comes a moment in every major event when the numbers stop telling the real story. The 2026 World Ducati Week brought 118,000 people to Misano to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of a company that has turned engineering into mythology. It’s a figure that fits neatly into a press release—and just as neatly fails to capture what I actually witnessed.

I’ve worked in communications for many years, and I’ve learned to be wary of words that are used too often. Family is one of them. In the corporate world, it’s repeated so frequently that it often loses its meaning—it appears in mission statements, corporate values, and opening speeches. Yet in Misano, over four days, I heard it spoken so many times by so many different people—riders, organizers, staff, marshals—that I found myself wondering whether, for once, it was simply true.

The first thing that remains: the faces

I’ve been around the world of two wheels long enough to recognize many of those faces long before shaking their hands that day. Carl Fogarty, Casey Stoner, Pecco Bagnaia, Nicolò Bulega, Marc Márquez. Names that have become legends in racing, yet up close remain—with a humanity that still surprises me every time—simply people. Tired people. Smiling people. Approachable people. Often far more down-to-earth than their sporting achievements might suggest.

That isn’t a trivial observation. The distance between a brand and the people who embody it is one of the hardest challenges any organization has to manage.

The second thing that remains: the faces of those who never step onto the stage

Behind every event that appears to “just happen” lies an enormous amount of invisible work, carried out by people whose names rarely make the headlines. Claudio Domenicali, who has led the company through this chapter of its history. Giulio Fabbri, Chiara Longo, Patrizia Cianetti, Edoardo Licciardello, Veronica Biava—and alongside them, an entire team that conceived, planned, debated, refined, loved, and, I imagine, occasionally cursed this event for two years before it became what it ultimately was.

Then there are the faces whose names appear nowhere at all: the staff, the marshals, the people managing the gates, the ones answering the thousandth question from visitors with the same patience as the first.

In the end, they are the true hidden cost behind every major production. Anyone who works in communications knows this well: a brand’s reputation is built not only in the moments when everyone is watching, but even more in those when no one is.

The third thing that remains: the eyes

And then there was the crowd.

During the Lenovo Race of Champions—with Nicolò Bulega, Lorenzo Baldassarri, and Alberto Surra taking the victories, alongside an extraordinary field including Marc Márquez, Pecco Bagnaia, Fabio Di Giannantonio, Lukas Tulovic, and many others—I saw something no engagement metric can truly measure: people looking skyward with eyes full of excitement, not because they had come to see a product, but because they had come to experience a sense of belonging.

Many of them, I suspect, discovered over those days that Ducati is not simply about speed. It is an emotional infrastructure built over a century—shaped more by stories passed from one generation to the next than by technical specifications.

What I saw

WDW2026 reminded me—with a clarity that few single events can offer—that big numbers tell us the scale of something, while faces tell us its meaning.

A company celebrating one hundred years could choose to tell its story through sales figures, market share, or revenue growth alone. Over four days in Misano, Ducati chose instead to tell its story through people—those on stage and those behind the scenes, those who ride and those who watch.

It’s a choice that comes at a higher cost, because people are far more complex than numbers. But it is also the only choice that, a hundred years later, truly leaves a lasting impression.

What I take home from this event—and from this profession—is always the same lesson: the lines on people’s faces tell a far richer story than any press release ever could.

-Rossella Rosciano, CEO MiRò Comunicazione