This year, the annual Festival Internazionale del Giornalismo animates medieval Perugia from Apri 3 to 7. I’ll look forward to being there and to immersion once again into such inspirational youth enthusiasm and familiarity with world issues during conferences on a myriad of subjects for four days.
I hope you can feel how the youth inspired this note of 2013:
As we waited to hear the panel discussion “Syria – civil war or media war?”, I asked Giacomo, a 24-year-old political science major from Rome why he was here at the four-day Festival Internazionale del Giornalismo.
“We live in a global society,” he said, “and we have to be able to interpret, understand world events – superficiality is not enough.”
I have been attending this extraordinary festival for years and two aspects always amaze me: the long lines of Italian teens and young adults on Friday and Saturday nights waiting to hear talks by journalists from around the world, and the questions they ask – with passione – so evidently based on well-founded familiarity with the topics, such as China’s economy, the Arab spring, the Israel-Palestine situation, Tunisian women post-revolution, Russia’s protest movement, technology use in the US presidential race, the environment, violence against women, the press in eastern Europe, ethnic wars in Sudan, the European Union, data journalism in southern Europe, the Italian state and organized crime…
The speakers? World-renowned journalists, Italian politicians, authors, cyber lawyers, professors of journalism, reporters. newscasters, film directors, activists, cartoonists.
And not only: Harper Reed, lead technology officer for US political campaigns, filled Perugia’s 13th-century Notaries’ Hall:
As they listened, young people took notes and photos on iphones, ipads, and computers while sitting under centuries-old frescoes.
What an interweaving of the past, the present, the future.
Read the program of the journalism festival, 2019
Click here for news on other treasures of Perugia
Read about another gathering of dynamic youth in Perugia
Click here to read about Umbria Jazz Perugia in July