What is the Rimini Meeting
It is the end of the seventies. Among some friends from Rimini who share a Christian experience, a desire is born to meet, get to know, and bring to Rimini everything good and beautiful that is present in the culture of those times. This is how the Meeting for the Friendship Amongst Peoples was born in 1980. An encounter among persons of different faiths and cultures. A place for friendship where peace, socialization, and a friendship among peoples may be established. These are encounters born from people that share a tension towards what is true, good, and beautiful.
Since then every year great political personalities, managers, representatives of different religions and cultures, intellectuals and artists, athletes and protagonists of the world scene visit it. It offers stories of men and women through conferences, exhibitions, shows, and sporting events. At The Rimini Meeting, culture expresses itself as an experience, originated by the desire to discover the beauty of reality. All of this happens in the seven days during which the world’s most attended cultural festival takes place.
During the last week of August, Rimini becomes the international capital of culture and gets invaded by “the people of the Meeting”, as the media described it: people that are curious, open, able to judge, come from all over the world for this event that takes place every year since more than thirty years.
Since the beginning, the Meeting has bet on the desire and the passion that each man has in his own heart, the desire for beauty, truth, and justice that Father Luigi Giussani, founder of the movement Communion and Liberation, has called elementary experience, common ground for encounter and dialogue.
ITS UNMISTAKABLE ASPECTS
Volunteers: the heart of the Meeting
For each edition thousands of volunteers go to Rimini from Italy and from all over the world; they pay for their own trip and lodging, and organize, stage, manage, and dismantle the Meeting. A living witness of how gratuitousness is a possible and testable value; the beauty of people that freely offer their work in order to live the experience of truth and to give witness to it.
A certain identity, an infinite openness
This human and cultural position is the starting point for a gaze towards the whole world. The Meeting is a place where it is possible to value each other, where the other’s differences are a positive provocation, a help to discover the truth that corresponds to the human needs. For this reason every year Jews, Buddhists, atheists, Orthodox, and Muslims attend it.
All-encompassing themes, in relationship with the world
Each year, starting from a particular title, we speak about economy, art, literature, science, politics, social affairs, and different kinds of music. A unique curiosity and openness. For thirty years a association, now a foundation, every year the Meeting dialogues with institutions, diplomatic delegations, public and private corporation.