What is the Rimini Meeting?

With an average attendance of over 700,000, the Rimini Meeting – held annually since 1980 and lasting one week in the second half of August – is the world’s biggest summer festival of encounters, exhibitions, music and spectacle. The event is unique of its kind: an association that for 29 years has sought to create points of contact between experiences and people of different faiths and cultures who share a positive desire for knowledge and reciprocal enhancement.

In recent years this human and cultural position, with is roots in the ecclesial movement of Communion and Liberation, has proved capable of an openness which has attracted testimonies from the most significant personalities on the world stage. Those who have appeared at the Meeting range from the Holy Father John Paul II to Chaim Potok, the then Cardinal Ratzinger, Mother Teresa of Calcutta, the Dalai Lama, Lech Walesa, Carlo Rubbia, George Smoot, Ennio Morricone, José Carreras, Jean Guitton, Luigi Giussani, Simone Veil, Martha Graham, David Rosen, François Michelin, and many other politicians, entrepreneurs, scientists, philosophers and artists.

Quite apart from its sheer diversity, the elementary experience of humanity reveals itself as the common ground for meeting and dialogue. Not doubts about identity but the certainty of having met something true spurs people to make discoveries and recognize all that is beautiful and good, in keeping with. St. Paul’s counsel: “Test everything; hold to what is good.”

Apart from a small core of 14 people who work full time on its organization, the Rimini Meeting is organized, prepared, managed and then dismantled by the impassioned and generous efforts of volunteers, who number over 3,000 each year. Most of them are young, they come from all over Italy and many other countries around the world. It is above all because of their contribution that the Rimini Meeting has become a major event, as the figures show: 400 exhibitions, 3000 encounters, 5000 guests and 850 journalists accredited to the last edition.

The Meeting is a great social event, a festive happening, a place where we celebrate the earthly glory of God as creator and friend. But it is above all a gratuitous gesture: thousands of people, of all ages and social backgrounds, give of their time and energy to create the event. The cultural discourse that unfolds there is just one of the fruits.