Brescia, the fourth edition of the Peace Festival has been postponed

Brescia, everything was ready. We worked for months to put together what should have been the fourth edition of the Peace Festival, which was scheduled to start today, November 6th.
This year too we started early, with the identification of the theme, and we finished late (as is our custom!) with the final definition of the program, with the graphic choices, with all the confirmations of the guests, of the rooms, of the details. To be prudent, given the difficult and uncertain situation, we had envisaged plans A, B, and C, with events that would be streamed, others that would combine the beauty of presence and the opportunity of remoteness.
This year too we had tried to go further, to set ourselves high objectives that would allow us not only to represent, narrate and delve into conflict scenarios and experiences of peace, actions, subjects and protagonists in the construction of a better world, where war and race to armaments (which is a precondition and often a contributory cause) are just a sad memory.
This year we also set ourselves a very concrete and very high goal. We had created an opportunity to relaunch the #Italiaripensaci campaign, in the presence of an authoritative representative of our Government who would have listened directly to the request from a high representative of the United Nations and from the representatives of the international organization ICAN (Nobel Peace Prize winner 2017). to also add our country's signature to the international treaty that provides for the ban of nuclear weapons. We were and are convinced that there are today the political conditions for our country to join this global civilizational agreement and we were confident that Brescia would raise theand right voices (local, national and international) to convince our Government to take this very important step.
In addition to this, the edition that should have opened today would have seen the intersection of in-depth and entertainment paths, meetings, initiatives, comparisons, exhibitions and shows on the theme chosen by our scientific and promotional committees, namely recognition and dialogue between identities as a requirement and modality for building peace.
Even before the Government's latest restrictive measures, which now prevent any type of event with the presence of the public, we had decided - out of a sense of responsibility and the strong desire to keep together a path that would have risked losing pieces along the way, and with them the beauty and richness of an event whose key feature is precisely the heterogeneity of languages ​​and expressive forms - to postpone the Festival to spring (we will define the exact dates in the coming weeks), when we trust there will be the conditions to carry it out at better and in its entirety.
In the months that separate us from the Festival we will continue to work. Some individual events will however be carried out remotely, via videoconference, and will indicate a path towards the Festival and constant attention to the many, too many, contexts that still generate conflicts, violence and wars.
We will do so starting next week (Wednesday 11th, at 15,30 pm) - thanks to an online round table organized by the Catholic University - talking about religious hatred, on the web and beyond (and here our thoughts can only go to the tragic events in Paris, Nice, Vienna). We will do it by holding it high attention to the many conflicts that still bloodied the world. Think, among many, of the Syrian one, the Libyan one, to that in Yemen, to those that still dot the African continent and, last but not least, to the situation in Afghanistan, where a few days ago there were 20 victims in an attack on a University of Kabul.
Precisely to honor the fundamental role of knowledge, teaching, freedom of expression, we will continue in these months to study dynamics, processes, experiences, with the aim of bringing them back to the attention of the public, not only in Brescia, in the special edition of the Peace Festival that we will create in spring 2021.
I want to thank all the entities, institutional and otherwise, from Brescia and beyond (the complete list is at the bottom of this press release), who collaborated with passion, professionalism and great willingness to create an event of extraordinary importance, which again this year enjoys the high patronage of the European Parliament, whose usability is only postponed for a few months.
So in spring, to launch our message of peace to the world from Brescia.