With Fai, Italy rekindles the lights on its treasures: the days of art on May 15 and 16

It is the first, impressive event organized in our country after the leaden season of closures: the Italy Museum rekindles the lights on its treasures by inviting us to visit 600 places where great and small history lives. Known assets, but often also little known or accessible only exceptionally, which, on 15 and 16 May, will be offered to the public of 300 cities thanks to the Fai Spring Days. There is a streak of courageous stubbornness and a pinch of madness in this initiative that has decided to set in motion such a complex machine at any cost and which only after the law decree of 22 April was given the green light.

So also for this edition – which, for the first time, requires a reservation on the Fai website and will ask each visitor for a minimum donation of 3 euros – the foundation responds to the desire of Italy that has innervated the 28 previous “kermesse” and that, a few hours after the launch in which he participated with the president, Andrea Carandini and the executive vice president, Marco Magnifico, also the minister Dario Franceschini, is already showing its full force. An example: the 900 inscriptions expected to admire the castle of Sammezzano in Reggello, an example of orientalist architecture born from the exalted dreams of Prince Ximenes of Aragon, are already sold out.

Among these itineraries in the beautiful, even a few steps to discover the inaccessible with the possibility of entering the rooms of the villa “Il Vascello”, designed in 1600 and seat, since 85, of the Grand Orient of Italy, the oldest Masonic institution of the country. Or the opportunity to breathe the decadent atmospheres of the Dannunziano hermitage of San Vito Chietino where the poet lived for 5 years with Barbara Leoni, his inspirational muse, spending much of his time in the library «suitable for all things of horizontal life and dream”.

Glancing among the proposals, the Palazzo Chiablese with the newly restored apartments of Carlo Felice di Savoia stands out in Turin, and the UN Campus with the clear architectures of Nello Renacco, now the headquarters of the UN, the Staff College, the Unicri, the Center for Unesco and the Turin School of Development.

Glimpses of the great “festival in the square dedicated to heritage” which, this year, received the Plaque of the President of the Republic and which is the result, as Andrea Carandini underlined, “of a cultural and civic force of national importance capable of bringing own subsidy to public institutions “. A subsidiarity that to be more effective “must, however, be intertwined with the essential, but never completely exhaustive, action of the Ministry of Culture which, at times, wears a statist raincoat even when it is not raining”.