Santa Croce, a special place of dialogue between identity and history

With this event Santa Croce is confirmed as a place with a special vocation towards dialogue, where spiritual and civil values, memory and contemporaneity all intertwine.  Its role as the Pantheon of Italian Greats, the true centre of Italy’s shared memory, completes its identity, with the tombs and funerary monuments of great figures such as Machiavelli, Michelangelo, Dante, Galileo and Foscolo. 

The Forum, inspired by the historical conventions of Giorgio La Pira, will host personalities from the political, religious and cultural world of the whole Mediterranean area and promote cooperation, peace actions and the sharing of inter cultural projects on an international level.

The events of Santa Croce, over the centuries, have intertwined with the Franciscan culture and the history of peace that has passed through Florence. It all started with the fraternity and strength of the Franciscan peace message; without doubt Giorgio La Pira had this fraternity vocation in mind when he chose to invite the mayors of the world’s capital cities and the protagonists of the Mediterranean meetings to Santa Croce.  In one of his famous speeches during the Mayors conference in Florence, in October 1955, the “holy” mayor declared that cities, like people, possess a vocation and a destiny, individuating in Florence a special capacity to build “bridges of hope and friendship”. 

His words bring us to the present day and become more decisive that ever in recalling the document of Abu Dhabi, on the human fraternity for world peace and communal coexistence, which inspired the Days of Fraternity promoted over recent years by the Santa Croce Opera and the Community of Minor Convent Friars, and also the current commitment to dialogue of this extraordinary meeting of Bishops and Mayors of the Mediterranean area.

The Opera and the Franciscan Community of Santa Croce have prepared a publication narrating the events of the monumental complex from the point of view of the relationship with the Bishops of Rome, especially for the mayors and bishops taking part in the Mediterranean forum and in the Eucharistic celebration of Pope Francis.

The text, edited by the Opera board member Giulio Conticelli and published by Mandragora, contains interventions by the Chairman Cristina Acidini, the Rector of the Basilica Father Giancarlo Corsini, the conservator Eleonora Mazzocchi, the archivist Claudia Timossi and Father Gabriel Marius Caliman.

The publication unfolds along a path that leads towards peace and fraternity, starting from the meeting between Francis and the Sultan in the narration by Coppo di Marcovaldo and Giotto himself. It concludes recalling other historical meetings: the conference of the mayors of the Mediterranean cities in 1955, with the handshake between Cardinal Elia Dalla Costa and the mayor of Moscow Jasnov, encouraged by La Pira (we were then in the middle of the Cold War), the Mediterranean talks between the fifties and sixties, the visit of Paul VI, on December 24th, 1966, who embraced the Florentine citizens hit by the floods and that of John Paul II, on the 19th of October, 1986, that was characterized by his open dialogue with the young.  And finally the meeting and the Document for Brotherhood of Abu Dhabi from which the Days of Fraternity at Santa Croce were created over recent years.