Europe, between internal tensions and prospects for enlargementthe increasingly dramatic and large war scenarios, the economic fronts that are heavily affected with important repercussions on the communities. And the intellectual world cannot remain indifferentbut indeed it is committed to contributing to the debate, with what the best knows how to do: in -depth analysis, ideas, free comparison, dialogue even between different positions. And an appeal: to peace.
This is what Taobuk’s 2025 is happening In a way perhaps never so incisive and effective, compared to the past. Starting from the concept, that of the borders, in its meaning of “limit in which the different meet”.
A special anniversary this year has enriched the three -day festival that will remain in history, with the celebration of the anniversary of the Messina and Taormina Conference, which in 1955 laid the foundations of the European Union.
“A cardinal project, which characterizes this fifteenth edition of Taobuk, and which, as president of the Festival, I strongly wanted – explains Antonella Ferrara – and which is promoted by the Sicily Region with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Municipalities of Messina and Taormina and the Taormina Arte Sicilia Foundation. Returning to welcome today in the same places that inspired the Europeanist dream, the foreign ministers of the 27 countries of the European Union together with the foreign ministers of the 9 countries officially candidates for joining, strengthens the centrality of Sicily in history and in the present of Europe and the international debate “.
“In Messina – he continues – seventy years ago, he left the path of European integration. Faced with the many challenges of today’s Europe, we do not only want to remember that event, but to start here on the borders of the European space, on this island in the center of the Mediterranean “.
«Today, as then, creative solutions are needed. It takes more Europe that is not necessarily the evolution of Europe we know. Today as then: common defense, borders, extended Mediterranean, transatlantic relationships are the load -bearing themes of the European Agenda ».
“The Mediterranean, in particular, a cradle of civilizations for millennia, is today to be a symbol of tragic contradictions. In 2017, Abraham Yehoushua, a guest of Taobuk, expressed a concept that continues to guide us. He placed the great Israeli intellectual, Sicily to become the Brussels of an extended Mediterranean identity, bridge and zipper between its banks and its heterogeneous souls. A diplomatic, cultural and identity vocation that grafts the millennial past of Sicily in full law in the political present of Europe and the Mediterranean world. Exactly in this perspective, we wanted that Taormina and Messina, Sicily, the theater of a fundamental moment of confrontation, reflection and investigation were once again, among the various European political souls, expressed by its highest institutional representatives “.
And another moment of particular importance on the subject of supranational dynamics yesterday took place with the event on international criminal justice, promoted in synergy with the Vittorio Ocrsiio Foundation at Palazzo Corvaja.
The report by Rosario Aitala, the Catania magistrate, the first vice president of the International Criminal Court of the Haguefollowed by Nicoletta Parisi, Giovanni Salvi, Francesco Paolo Sisto, deputy minister of justice, and Luciano Violante, who underlined how the term “borders” is the word of the moment. The value of the supranational body, which also participates in Italy, while countries such as the US, China, Russia, Israel are also reiterated. «You can win the war but lose peace. No to the rhetoric of the right war, “said Aitala, in one of his rare public interventions.
“Today – highlights Ferrara – a cultural festival is proud to indicate to politics the value of peace and dialogue – because we Europeans are children of a secular peace – The sense of history, the value of democracy, freedom and tolerance. Ideally our writers, our artists, our philosophers, our guests of every area that for 15 years have animate this festival, have delivered you the goal of a Europe of peace and beauty “.