August with De Gasperi 2023 - Anxieties

From 29 July to 28 September, the Festival Agosto degasperiano 2023 | August with De Gasperi is back, the series of events organised every summer by the Fondazione Trentina Alcide De Gasperi to make the places dear to the Trentino statesman the theatre for a multi-voice reflection on the challenges of civil life.

A programme of eight public lectures that calls upon illustrious interpreters to confront the anxieties of our time, in the conviction that in order to free our flight towards the future it is necessary to give a name and a meaning to the anxieties that permeate our present.

Eight public lectures to be listened to, meditated upon and transferred to our everyday life, to face it with more awareness and wisdom. Eight lectures to broaden our gaze and learn to see the possibilities that open up within the constraints that history places on us. Eight opportunities to meet to rediscover ourselves as a community and rediscover together our faith in the future. Because, as Alcide De Gasperi often repeated, 'discouragement is the main danger of democracies'.

Marco Odorizzi, director of the Alcide De Gasperi Trentino's Foundation has summarised here the sense of the event: 'We want to take De Gasperi's sensitivity for civil and political commitment, and blend it with the needs of the present. The aim of the festival, in fact, is not to talk about the statesman, but to talk about us through the lesson he left us'. By summarising the meaning of the most recent editions, the director went on to explain the significance of this year's title, Inquietudini | Anxieties : 'We live in a time suspended between the certainties of the past, which no longer comfort us, and the expectation of a future that never arrives. We feel lost, but we must not stop asking ourselves what lies beyond this troubled sea, because only in this way can we choose and help shape our destiny, individually and collectively'. The eight meetings are also meant to be a warning: 'oversimplification creates consensus, but it does not create freedom. The challenge we want to take up is to recover the value of complexity, we trust the degasperian idea that all personal interests can converge in the common interest, in the common good'.