30 May 2025
“A surprising workshop of creativity.” The Meeting is also this for Professor Alessandro Rovetta. For the 2025 edition, along with colleagues Marco Rossi and Tancredi Bella, he will curate the exhibition “Living Stones. Romanesque Europe Wears Beauty”, “dedicated to the birth and spread of Romanesque art and architecture throughout Europe between the 11th and 12th centuries. One of the most impressive phenomena of Western civilization, full of positivity and creativity, capable of involving the entire population in the construction of churches and, above all, in living them as places filled with meaning.”
The goal is to offer visitors an immersive experience in the vibrant heart of the Middle Ages: “Through videos, images, music and texts, we will help people feel the same wonder that filled those who lived at the time, when they entered churches capable of communicating attraction, resonance, and the desire to walk toward one’s destiny.” And he adds: “It will not be a nostalgic message; we will also propose a meaningful connection with the present day.”
This exhibition is part of a long and passionate journey. “We began collaborating with the Meeting as exhibition curators in the late 1980s, involving colleagues and students from our universities and others, working closely with the event organizers and seeking to delve deeply into the proposals. We engaged in on-the-ground dialogue with a very attentive and interactive audience.”
For Rovetta, the Meeting is more than a mass event: “It is a privileged opportunity to bring one's professional expertise into dialogue with a cultural proposal that is well defined yet extremely open. A place where people reflect, welcome and gather. It is also a great opportunity for human relationships.”
To those who ask if and why the Meeting is a “gift for the world,” Rovetta responds without hesitation. “The first and easiest answer is to look at the number of personalities and visitors who come to the Meeting each year: it is an extraordinary sounding board. But that alone wouldn’t be much, if it were not rooted in a profound search for the good, the true and the beautiful that animates the whole event.”
The heart of the Meeting is: encounter, dialogue, construction. “This is what transcends the boundaries of the event and makes it a point of reference for many—whether out of curiosity or in the hope of finding a concrete perspective of hope.”
A hope that must be supported—also financially. “The Meeting is a surprising workshop of generosity, open to every generation and field of expertise. But it cannot sustain itself alone. On the other hand, the more it is supported, the more free collaboration grows as well, in the shared perspective of making the Meeting increasingly attractive, proactive and engaging.”
Supporting the Meeting means contributing to an experience that leaves a mark. For the creation of an exhibition, “the challenge of materials and costs is truly crucial, if we want to offer a proposal worthy of its intent. Bringing men and women back into their daily lives with the living memory of something true and beautiful, experienced in a context of friendship, is a great satisfaction. And one more reason to support this endeavor.”
