Distinguished authorities, supporters and friends of UWC Adriatic, to whom we owe the very existence and operation of Adriatic;
Dear students, alumni, teachers and all staff members of the College, *you are Adriatic*, our ever strong and vibrant community;
Dear people of Duino, with whom we have shared our home for 40 years now;
Thank you first of all for joining us once again today on this solemn day.
In the past few days – as I always do when I am at the College – I have mingled with our students, eating in their company in Mensa, or chatting with them in the corridors of the College or in the streets of Duino. I saw them interacting with one another – first-years alongside their “secondi”, looking somewhat new to the place since they have only just arrived (and indeed the academic year has started less than a month ago). And in so doing I found – again and again – confirmation of what an excellent decision it was to choose the Ara Pacis Mundi to solemnly celebrate our UWC Day – as the other 17 colleges are doing across the world – as well as to open the 2022/23 Academic Year, and – on top of that – to start off our celebrations for the 40th anniversary of Adriatic.
I consider it a privilege and an honour for the College that the Municipal Administration of Medea and the Italian General Commission for Honouring the Fallen – and I thank both Mayor Igor Godeas and the Director of the Redipuglia Military Memorial, Lieutenant Colonel Massimiliano Fioretti – have allowed us to gather here today. Thanks to the town of Medea, and to former Mayor Franco Stacul, also for having offered us a performance by Maestro Mauro Maur from Medea, an outstanding soloist whose magnificent trumpet will enhance two particularly solemn moments of today’s celebrations – an especially precious gift for a College that has music as one of its core strengths and values.
Few places like this monument – which honours the memory of the fallen of all wars, regardless of which side they fought on – can so powerfully represent the values of the UWC philosophy and educational model. And this is all the more true now, with a war in Europe that has been in progress for months, a war that is all the more terrible and dangerous because of the direct involvement of a nuclear power.
This academic year we have in Duino – and you have just seen this with your own eyes – students from 81 countries and from the most diverse and disparate situations. Our students come, in many cases, from countries that have been at war – and at war with one another – often for years, in some cases even since before the UWC movement was founded 60 years ago.
Kurt Hahn, the German, Jewish educator who – having experienced two world wars and Nazi persecution – was among the founders of the UWC movement, found empirical confirmation of his profound research findings when, at the end of the 1950s, he was able to see for himself at international meetings, that the representatives of countries that had been enemies during the recently ended worldwide conflict succeeded – against all odds – to engage in a concrete and cooperative dialogue.
Based also on this observation, Kurt Hahn ultimately came to the conclusion that bringing together young adults between the ages of 16 and 19 for a certain period of time, young adults who by then identified with a specific national, cultural and religious group, yet were still sufficiently flexible and open-minded, despite coming from the most diverse situations – even from countries in conflict with one another – was a solid recipe for fostering peace and a sustainable future, because it was an outstanding way to engage them in dialogue and make them truly listen to one another. And that this – given the role of personal example and initiative in the UWC education and the emphasis it places on concrete and positive action to make the world a better place – could then have a positive ripple effect, both within our communities and globally.
In dwelling on this I cannot refrain from quoting the powerful words of Nelson Mandela, who – unsurprisingly – was for several years the Honorary President of the UWC Movement, and whom our students Giovanna and Mihailo, by now far more than Masters of Ceremonies, quoted earlier in their speech. I am referring to his famous words education is the most powerful weapon to change the world.
Deeply convinced of the soundness of these values, at the end of the 1970s a small group of visionaries – visionaries, who fortunately were also very pragmatic – among whom I would like to name in particular Corrado Belci, who was to become the first President of Adriatic – staunchly supported the allocation of funds for the post-earthquake reconstruction of Friuli to the establishment of a United World College to be located on the border between East and West, in Duino. Thus, the goal of building bridges to foster dialogue between peoples, which is part and parcel of the UWC value came to be, both physically and geographically.
Truly, then, Peace does begin with us. I believe that the theme of the Peace One Day 2022 celebrations is as fitting as it can be: peace really does begin with us, and it must be increasingly so in the micro-world of our College, in each UWC College, and then spread out to the world that we have the good fortune of inhabiting – both on a planetary scale and at the level of our individual communities.
I know that in these difficult times this requires an act of optimism, of faith even, but it is a gamble worth taking.
Just as more than 40 years ago the “pragmatic visionaries” who wanted a United World College in Duino made a bet, and won it: and in the 1982/83 Academic Year – precisely 40 years ago – Adriatic began to function thanks to the support, crucial at that time and no less so today, of the Autonomous Region of Friuli Venezia Giulia and the Italian State, via the Ministry for Foreign Affairs. They have been joined over the years by numerous other supporters and friends, without whom, quite simply, the College could not exist and grow, as it has done, notwithstanding the times of hardship it has navigated over these 40 years, and whom I would like to thank from the bottom of my heart.
