Daniele Cipriani's greeting
Today I take office as Artistic Director of the Festival dei Due Mondi,. By entrusting me with this assignment, many people have believed in the energy and vision that I can bring to the Festival and I would like to thank them here: the Minister of Culture, Alessandro Giuli, the Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Festival Dei Due Mondi Foundation, Mayor of Spoleto Andrea Sisti, as well as the members of the Board of Directors: Maria Teresa Venturini Fendi, Paolo Feliziani, Stefano Lado and Mauro Luchetti.
I deeply love Spoleto. Directing his Festival is a return to my house of the soul, inhabited by the memories of people dear to me and who have made history, as well as of shows that I created here with passion, many of them under the artistic direction of Giorgio Ferrara. Memories emerge of my very first collaboration at the 2001 Festival (when, in my early twenties, I collaborated with Alberto Testa on the International Dance Marathon for Maestro Menotti's 90th anniversary), and of the generosity of Carla Fendi, whose Foundation continues its tireless commitment.
I take the reins from my predecessor, Monique Veaute, who left the Festival with an increase in spectators and revenues compared to the previous edition, good ground on which to make it grow further and also to sprout new opportunities for the city of Spoleto. I will be supported in this task by two prestigious and internationally renowned consultants whom I strongly wanted in my team: the pianist Beatrice Rana together with the director and playwright Leo Muscato. As of now, I thank all the members of the staff of the Festival Dei Due Mondi Foundation with whom I will work, knowing that I can count on their proven professionalism.
The Festival of Two Worlds belongs profoundly to our cultural identity, so I consider it vital to enhance its memory and roots, drawing from them life, nourishment and energy for new germinations in what will be, in my intentions - as already in those of Maestro Menotti - an annual event of great depth and international importance, an event that will attract an increasingly varied and wide audience. RADICI will therefore be the theme of my first edition. The extraordinary Menottian legacy will be recognizable in the program of the next five years, together with constant research in the most original and sophisticated contemporaneity.
Working in the arts sector means carrying out a mission to instill beauty in the world, not an end in itself, but one that predisposes the society in which we live to become - in a word - more 'human'. Authentic art, a rare plant to cultivate with conviction, can really help to make the whole world better. It is for this purpose, starting precisely from the roots, that I will direct the Festival dei Due Mondi, in Spoleto.