23 August 2025
From the design stage to the teardown stage, the long journey to build the Meeting.
“Do it well so that everything is beautiful”
Stefano Ferri, the person responsible for the setup tells us what it means to build this place.
“Our task is to do things well and make them beautiful. If you do something well, if you make it beautiful, also those who visit are amazed and can experience the reason why the Meeting was created” Stefano Ferri, engineer, has been responsible for twenty years for the setup of the Meeting and says “the most beautiful thing is giving physical form the needs of the Meeting”.
It is a task that he is involved with for the whole year, together with hundreds of volunteers. It starts right after the previous Meeting ends, with a debriefing to assess what worked and what didn’t. Then the work for the next edition begins. After the design phase, the volunteers begin to map out the spaces.
“After this, we begin to fill the spaces which have been built. Every time it begins with ten people, then twenty, thirty, fourty, then at the Pre-Meeting there are five hundred, and finally at the Meeting itself, 3,000 volunteers. Throughout, the relationship between each and everyone facilitates discussion, and everyone helps each other out to continually improve.” With this concept in mind, we aim to create unified projects which respond to all concrete needs: from the exhibitions to the conferences and the organisation of the spaces; the stage; the scenery, from the restaurants to the shopping stalls. And in building these functional spaces, there’s attention to beauty, to detail, in order to build a place that is beautiful for everyone who uses it. For Stefano Ferri, the Meeting is exactly this: a testament to beauty. “The reason the Meeting was born, and why it continues to happen every year, is to tell the world that there’s a source of positivity and good. Its origin is that very personal experience of those who gave life to the Meeting and who continue to live it, since if it is a good thing for them, it also can be for everyone. The most beautiful thing is seeing how volunteers give everything they have to make sure that things turn out well.”
Then comes the teardown, at the end of everything. It’s the moment when everything that was planned and built over several months is taken down in just two days. But it isn’t really the end. There is no sense of nostalgia in dismantling what has been created. “The teardown is another beautiful moment. There’s a sense of harmony between people but also a certain tension, because in two days everyone has to empty the spaces and take away everything that was built in fifteen days of intense work. It requires meticulous planning, attention, precision, and order. There are no tears in taking down what has been created, there’s still a great attention to do well what there is left to do.” And it is due to this very attention that during the whole week, thousands of people from the entire world have given, therefore contributing to building this place.
