Meeting
for Friendship Among Peoples
With a yearly average of over 700 thousand visitors, the Meeting in Rimini—which has taken place every year since 1980, in a week during late August—is the most frequented summer festival of encounters, culture events, music and stage-shows in the world. Though the number and variety of events characterizing the program has increased over the years, the number of attendances is so great that the presence of the public at the single encounters, some of dealing with complex cultural questions, is extraordinary, often of the order of 5-10 thousand, sometimes reaching well over 10 thousand.
Over the years we have presented events, exhibitions, theatrical productions and concerts of the highest level, in addition to witnesses by such historic personalities as: John Paul II, don Giussani, Mother Teresa of Calcutta, Eugene Ionesco, Lech Walesa, Giovanni Testori, William Congdon, Augusto del Noce, Olivier Clement, Mario Luzi, Margherita Guarducci, Giulio Andreotti and Riccardo Muti, who have enriched the kermesse with high-profile contributions.
The Meeting aspires to be a place where the Christian faith “cries out to the whole world the passion for man which characterizes it,” always in open encounter, in dialogue and through acknowledging the value of human and artistic expressions coming from various cultures and traditions.
Apart from a small nucleus of people who work full time the whole year in its preparation, the great Rimini Festival is organized, set up, managed and then taken down by volunteer workers, over two thousand of them, coming from all over Italy and from ten other countries representing every continent. |
