RIMINI MEETING
It’s the late 1970s. Among some friends in Rimini who share the Christian experience, a desire is born to meet, get to know, and bring to Rimini everything that is beautiful and good in the culture of the time. Thus, the Meeting for Friendship Among Peoples originated in 1980. It is a gathering of people from different faiths and cultures. A place of friendship where peace, coexistence, and friendship among peoples can be built. A network of encounters arises from people sharing a quest for truth, goodness, and beauty.
Since then, every year, prominent figures from politics, managers from the economy, representatives of religions and cultures, intellectuals, artists, athletes, and key players on the global stage have attended. Stories of people are at the center of meetings, exhibitions, shows, and sports events. Culture at the Meeting is expressed as an experience driven by the desire to discover the beauty of reality. This all takes place during the days of the event, which has become the most attended cultural festival in the world over the years.
In the last week of August, Rimini becomes the capital of international culture and is invaded by the “people of the Meeting,” as defined by the media: curious, open-minded people capable of judgment from all over the world for this event that has been repeated since the early 1980s.
Since its inception, the Meeting has bet on the desire and passion in every man’s heart, that desire for beauty, truth, and justice that Don Luigi Giussani, founder of the Communion and Liberation movement, called elementary experience, a common ground for encounter and dialogue.
Volunteers,
the heart of the Meeting
For each edition, thousands of volunteers from Italy and around the world come to Rimini, paying for their travel and accommodation, to organize, set up, manage, and then dismantle the Meeting. A living testimony to how gratuity is a possible and experimentable value; the beauty of people who freely commit themselves to experience the truth and bear witness to it.
A certain identity,
an infinite openness
This human and cultural stance is the starting point for a gaze directed at the whole world. The Meeting is a place where mutual appreciation is possible, where the difference of the other is a positive provocation, a help to discover the truth corresponding to the needs of man. For this reason, Jews, Buddhists, atheists, Orthodox, and Muslims participate every year.
Transversal themes in relation to the world
Each year, around a theme, topics such as economics, art, literature, science, politics, social issues, and music of all kinds are discussed. A unique curiosity and transversality in the world. For 30 years a private association, now a foundation, every year the Meeting dialogues with institutions, diplomatic representations, public and private entities.
