26 August 2025
An Experience of Gratuitousness
“Giving frees you from money, and this allows one to look at reality in a new way”
Francesco Cassese is one of the curators of the exhibition “You Can’t Die for a Dollar. The Revolution of Amadeo Peter Giannini”. The first time he came to the Meeting he was 17 years old and was traveling with his parents; he asked them to stop in Rimini because he wanted to be a volunteer. His father reacted by asking: “But who makes you do it?”.
It is a question that Francesco has carried within himself and continues to carry because it touches the very heart of the Meeting. That year he volunteered in a pizzeria and keeps a very beautiful memory of it; it was a new experience for him that struck him deeply. “The Meeting –he recounts– is the possibility of encounters that generate stories from which networks of relationships are born.” Then Francesco observes that the reason one comes to the Meeting is precisely the encounter. And every encounter requires going deeper to understand how to respond to his father’s question: “But who makes you do it?”. Over the years, Francesco discovered that the core of the Meeting is the spirit of gratitude. It is the gratitude witnessed by the many visitors and volunteers he meets that fills him with wonder.
And one evening, while talking with a group of donors –some of them entrepreneurs– who support the Meeting and express gratitude for the existence of this place, he understood even more the uniqueness of this experience.
Francesco then emphasizes that gratitude makes people happy, joyful, as one can see at the Meeting, and he shares the experience he is having at the exhibition on Amadeo Peter Giannini with university students from Bocconi and the Catholic University: “These young people –he says– have so much desire for life in their eyes, they have an energy that allows them to identify with what they are doing.”
“Every year I leave the Meeting –he says– with an expanded heart and mind. Here I have experienced the category of possibility; it has become clearer to me that the encounter I have had is connected to everything, and life becomes the verification of this openness.”
But why should someone donate something, even a small sum, to the Meeting? Giving comes from gratitude, Francesco stresses. And he adds: “Giving frees you from money, and this allows one to look at reality in a new way.”
