In the year L’Aquila is Italy’s Capital of Culture, one of its most lasting legacies may not be a festival, a stage, or a crowd in the streets. It may be a small 15th-century panel, now inside the Castello Cinquecentesco.

Antonello da Messina’s Ecce Homo has entered the permanent collection of the National Museum of Abruzzo, known as MuNDA. Recently acquired by Italy’s Ministry of Culture, the painting now has a stable home in L’Aquila, in the castle that returned to public life after restoration and a new museum layout.

There is a quiet force in the timing. Only a few days earlier, the city’s streets and squares had been filled by thousands of people taking part in Marinella Senatore’s collective performance. That was public, moving, temporary. This is different. The Ecce Homo stays.

The work is an opistographic panel: on one side, the Ecce Homo; on the other, Saint Jerome penitent in a northern European-style landscape. Before arriving in L’Aquila, it was shown at the Italian Senate and underwent diagnostic studies and conservation work by the Central Institute for Restoration.

The acquisition has a clear public meaning. Bought by the state through Sotheby’s, the painting has been taken out of the private market and placed in a public museum. Culture minister Alessandro Giuli presented the move as part of a broader idea: major works of art should become part of a shared heritage, not remain locked away for the few.

That is the heart of the story. The painting is not simply being exhibited. It is being returned to public view, in a city that has spent years rebuilding not only its walls, but also its civic life.

MuNDA director Federica Zalabra said the work will be displayed in room 9, dedicated to 15th-century art in Abruzzo. Its presence will help visitors read the artistic landscape of central Italy more widely, including the influence of northern European painting.

The restoration matters too. Conservation work has brought back the original colours of the panel, no longer hidden by modern varnish. Further studies will help scholars better understand Antonello’s working method, still partly unknown. A scientific publication is expected in 2027.

The Ecce Homo may still travel for exhibitions. But its point of return is now clear: L’Aquila, MuNDA, the Castello Cinquecentesco.

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The city started moving just after four in the afternoon.

First came the sound. Then the banners. Then the bodies: dancers, musicians, children, older people, athletes, performers, people with disabilities, citizens who had spent the previous months preparing to become part of the same public scene.

Marinella Senatore’s The School of Narrative Dance left Maxxi L’Aquila and crossed the historic centre towards Collemaggio. It was not a parade in the decorative sense of the word. It was more like a moving score, written with steps, voices, flags, drums, sudden acrobatics and fragments of words carried above the crowd.

The project, organised by Maxxi L’Aquila as part of the programme for L’Aquila Italian Capital of Culture 2026, brought together dozens of local groups, associations, choirs, musicians, performers and sports communities. In the procession there was also Maria Emanuela Bruni, president of the Fondazione Maxxi. Among the institutional figures present were the mayor of L’Aquila, Pierluigi Biondi, and the president of the Academy of Fine Arts, Rinaldo Tordera.

But the centre of the day was elsewhere. It was in the mixture. Old age and youth. Ability and disability. Classical music and breaking. Choirs and parkour. Majorettes and contemporary dance. Sbandieratori, skaters, yoga groups, percussionists, singers, children holding banners, adults trying to keep rhythm, and the city watching from the sides of the street.

Senatore had given the clearest key to the work a few days earlier: “My body is here in the street, my broken body, crooked, straight, it doesn’t matter, but it is my body.”

Yesterday that sentence became visible.

The procession began at Maxxi with Corale 99 and the harp of the Conservatory, alongside karate, tombolo, break dance, parkour, pole dance and skate. It then moved towards the Fontana Luminosa with Conservatory percussionists, the Collarmele majorettes, Diversamente Danza, Progetto Ritmica, Lab Anna Basti and the Golden Girls.

At the Fontana Luminosa, Corale 24 performed “Melihua” and “Pena del alma”, and another group performed “Tornando a casa”, a new song created for the occasion. The title itself carried something of the day’s mood: returning home, but not quite as before. Returning through the body, through a shared rhythm, through a city that for a few hours stopped being only a place to cross and became a place to inhabit together.

One of the most striking elements was the sensitivity of the work. Not sensitivity as a slogan, not the usual cultural vocabulary polished until it says almost nothing. Here it appeared in the small things: in the voices, in the banners, in the bodies moving at different speeds, in the fragile sentences turned into images during the workshops.

Some of those sentences travelled through the city on fabric.

“We are this meadow of needles under the sky.”

“I am an armour sewn with threads of scar and skin of revolt.”

“We rise by lifting others.”

“Outside my mind there is a green garden surrounded by a ball of fire.”

“I think that my favourite place is my room.”

They were not captions. They were traces. Pieces of private imagination made public, lifted above the crowd without becoming spectacle. They gave the parade a narrative layer: the city was not only moving, it was also speaking.

Along the route, Zero Gravity brought acrobatics, parkour, breaking and freestyle into unexpected combinations. Not only hip hop bases, but also classical music. The contrast worked because it avoided the obvious. Bodies usually associated with urban movement entered another soundscape; classical music, for once, did not sit politely in a concert hall. It ran, jumped, turned, landed.

The route crossed Largo Tunisia, Piazza Regina Margherita, the Quattro Cantoni, Corso Vittorio Emanuele II, the Villa Comunale and then Viale Collemaggio. Different groups took the lead at different moments. The sbandieratori alternated at the front of the procession. The Music Together Band accompanied the final stretch towards the basilica.

By the time the parade reached Collemaggio, the separate parts had become one body again.

The ending was not a speech, and that was probably for the best. Speeches often arrive too late, after the thing has already happened, and try to explain what the body understood first. In front of the basilica, the groups and participants gathered for a collective dance. People who had marched, sung, played, carried banners, jumped, watched, followed and waited were suddenly part of the same final movement.

Letters from children, images of a wounded city, works of art and now digital spaces. The exhibition “Sarajevo, from war to peace” revisits Sarajevo thirty years after the siege, telling the story of a city that still bears its scars.

At the heart of the project is the link between Sarajevo and Puglia, forged during the war. Journalist Franco Giuliano collected and published letters written by Bosnian children to Italian children, opening an exchange across the Adriatic. On one side were simple requests written in the middle of war. On the other came replies, aid and signs of support.

From that human connection, the exhibition widens into a larger story told through articles, photographs, video interviews and archival material. It also includes Ars Aevi, the contemporary art collection born during the war as a cultural response to the siege. Over time, that experience developed into the Ars Aevi Museum of Contemporary Art, with a new building designed by Renzo Piano.

Part of the project also exists in digital form, with an immersive version that lets visitors explore documents and testimonies in a virtual space. The aim is simple: to keep memory accessible without making it distant or abstract.

VIDEO MUSEO:

Foto allegata: Di Dans – Opera propria, CC BY-SA 4.0

A blue beam of light rises from Palazzo Margherita. At the Emiciclo, silence holds until it is broken by Handel’s Sarabande, played under the portico by a string quartet and harpsichord from I Solisti Aquilani. This is how L’Aquila marked the 17th anniversary of the earthquake of 6 April 2009, which killed 309 people in the city and nearby towns.

People arrived slowly. They took the flowers handed out at the start of the ceremony and stopped in front of the sheet carrying the victims’ names in red. This year there was no procession. Instead, the city stayed still.

From the Emiciclo, the commemoration moved towards nearby Piazzale Paoli. There, relatives of the victims spoke again, asking younger people to become “sentinels of memory”. Later, 450 white flowers were laid at the monumental fountain. It was a simple gesture, repeated once more, and still heavy with meaning.

As the city remembered, messages also came from the country’s highest offices. Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said that remembering also means “continuing to be there, with seriousness and responsibility”. Senate president Ignazio La Russa spoke of responsibility, prevention and national solidarity. Chamber president Lorenzo Fontana said the memory of that night still demands responsibility and commitment in building the future.

During the morning, commemorations continued at some of the city’s most symbolic places. Flowers were laid at the wooden angel outside the Casa dello Studente. Mayor Pierluigi Biondi said the wound “does not heal”, but added that this should not prevent the city from living in the present and imagining its future. At the church of Anime Sante, Archbishop Antonio D’Angelo celebrated mass for the victims. The programme then continued at the basilica of Collemaggio, with a moment of reflection featuring the Sistine Chapel Choir, actor Daniele Pecci and artistic director Leonardo De Amicis.

The “forest family” case centres on a couple living in Abruzzo with their three children in an isolated home, outside conventional schooling and basic services. After the authorities intervened and removed the children, the story grew into a wider debate about parental freedom and child protection.

How far can parental freedom go when raising children? That question sits at the centre of much of the foreign coverage of Italy’s “forest family” case. In Italy, the story has often been told through court orders, inspections, schooling rules, health checks and housing standards. Abroad, the frame changes. The case starts to look like a struggle between family autonomy and state authority.

That shift becomes sharper when the parents are heard directly. In official accounts, the family appears as a list of problems: an unsuitable home, no indoor toilet, no formal schooling, and limited cooperation with social services. In interviews, the same facts are given a different meaning. They become part of a life built around nature, simplicity, self-reliance and distrust of imposed rules.

The change is even stronger when Catherine Birmingham and Nathan Trevallion speak in English. It is the language in which they can explain themselves with full awareness. They sound clearer, firmer and more emotionally precise. Their choices may still seem extreme, but their reasoning becomes harder to dismiss as eccentricity or confusion. That is one reason why foreign coverage often feels less focused on irregularity and more focused on principle. This is not just translation. It is control of tone, nuance and argument.

The clearest example is 60 Minutes Australia. The programme stays with the house, the animals, the stove, the shared bedroom and the compost toilet. But its real centre is elsewhere. Once the parents speak at length, the case stops looking like a local oddity and starts reading like a moral argument: what harms children more, growing up outside the system or being separated from their mother and father?

That is why the tone changes so sharply in the foreign press. The story moves away from the language of rural eccentricity and toward a broader question that travels easily across borders: when does an unconventional way of raising children become serious enough for the state to step in? In that sense, the parents’ voice does not erase the legal issues. It changes the temperature of the story. And once that happens, the case is no longer only about a house in the woods. It becomes a debate about who gets to decide what a safe childhood looks like.

AUSTRALIAN TV VIDEO YOUTUBE

Links
The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/nov/24/italian-court-ruling-to-take-children-from-family-living-in-woods-labelled-kidnapping-by-deputy-pm

Reuters: https://www.reuters.com/world/british-father-denounces-italian-courts-removal-offgrid-children-2025-11-21/

60 Minutes Australia / 9Now: https://9now.nine.com.au/60-minutes/unconventional-australian-family-caught-in-a-media-storm-in-italy/c6a1424b-e0ff-4558-9e19-ced2edd48271

CNN: https://edition.cnn.com/2025/11/23/europe/italy-off-grid-children-custody-intl-latam/index.html

ABC News Australia: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-11-25/italian-court-removes-children-off-grid-australian-uk-couple/106049422

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This summer it will come back.

From 27 June to 27 September 2026, the altarpiece will be shown at the Castello Cinquecentesco, home of MuNDA, the National Museum of Abruzzo. The exhibition is part of the programme for L’Aquila, Italian Capital of Culture 2026. The show is titled “The Visitation in L’Aquila. Raphael and Pontormo.”

At its centre will be Raphael’s painting. Nearby will hang Pontormo’s Visitation, arriving from Carmignano and owned by the Diocese of Pistoia. Around them, the exhibition will include drawings, prints, paintings and archival documents that trace the work’s origins and its artistic context.

The project has now received formal approval from the city council. L’Aquila’s municipal government has endorsed the agreement with MuNDA and acknowledged the exhibition plan already approved by the Capital of Culture committee. The total cost is estimated at €892,000, with €711,000 financed through the Restart 2 programme. The remaining funds will come through co-financing.

Under the agreement, MuNDA will oversee the scientific and curatorial work, while the municipality will coordinate administration, communication and funding. Mayor Pierluigi Biondi described the initiative as a key moment in the cultural programme of 2026 and a project built through cooperation between local and national institutions.

The return of the painting required coordination between the Museo del Prado, the Italian Ministry of Culture, the Embassy of Spain in Italy, the Diocese of Pistoia, the city of L’Aquila and MuNDA. Museum director Federica Zalabra said the project reached its final stage after nearly two years of preparation.

The painting itself measures 202 by 146 centimetres. For most of its history it has lived elsewhere. For three months next summer, it will stand again in the city where it was first made.

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The company has emerged from its “stealth” phase, a period of low visibility used to consolidate research and secure patents. Vesalic says it has identified a systemic pathological process, largely outside the central nervous system, that may contribute to ALS. The work has led to new biomarkers that can be detected through a non-invasive blood test.

In recent years, experimental blood tests for ALS have focused mainly on proteins associated with neuronal damage. Ricotti argues that those markers often reflect disease that is already advanced and can be difficult to apply on a large scale. Vesalic’s approach, she says, focuses instead on a cellular metabolic imbalance that may appear before clinical symptoms.

Exosomes, tiny particles released by cells, can carry biological signals through the body. By analysing them in blood, Vesalic aims to pick up altered signals linked to very early stages of degeneration, with the goal of anticipating diagnosis and improving monitoring of disease progression.

The company is also developing a treatment designed to neutralise the toxic signals it is tracking before they reach motor neurons. Preclinical studies on animal models are currently under way. Early pre-clinic data is promising, but further work will be required before clinical trials in humans.

Founded in 2023, Vesalic works with international research centres including University College London and Imperial College London, and has built a patent portfolio to protect its innovations. Its scientific director is Thomas Voit.

Vesalic is setting out a plausible shift in where ALS may begin, together with a route from biomarker to treatment. The critical point will be clinical confirmation, including robustness, scalability, and patient-level outcomes.

L’Aquila ha dedicado más de una década y media a recomponerse tras el trauma del terremoto de 2009. En 2026, la ciudad luce por fin la insignia de Capital Italiana de la Cultura, y con ella aflora una pregunta tan simple como incómoda: ¿qué significa un año de efervescencia cultural en un lugar donde la vida pública ha estado, literalmente, en fase de reparación durante años?

Los organizadores apuestan por un programa extendido en el tiempo. Con más de 300 citas repartidas a lo largo del calendario, buscan evitar la saturación de una temporada corta y sostener un flujo continuo. El portal oficial actúa como agenda actualizada (también nuestro medio digital recoge todos los eventos de L’Aquila 2026).

La inauguración se celebró el 17 de enero. La mañana tuvo un carácter institucional, marcado por la sobriedad de las ceremonias oficiales. Al caer de la tarde, el protagonismo se desplazó al centro histórico. Calles y plazas volvieron a llenarse y funcionaron como escenario social. El momento central llegó en la Piazza Duomo, con un objetivo claro: favorecer el reencuentro del cino con su entorno urbano. La ciudad quiso mostrarse como un espacio vivo.

L’Aquila vive hoy entre dos tiempos. Por un lado, el de la reconstrucción física: andamios, obras persistentes, mudanzas lentas. Por otro, el de la expectativa: habitar los espacios recuperados y convertir la restauración arquitectónica en vida cotidiana.

La Capitalidad llega en ese umbral crítico donde la piedra ya se sostiene, pero el tejido social aún debe reajustarse a nuevas rutinas. El programa se plantea como una secuencia de propuestas de escala media, con algunos hitos de mayor alcance. La apuesta es la continuidad. En muchas capitales, la cultura se percibe como una vitrina. En L’Aquila puede convertirse en algo más determinante: una prueba de uso. El éxito de este año se medirá también en su capacidad para lograr que los residentes regresen, se queden y habiten el centro como parte de su vida diaria.

El desafío trasciende la programación. Se trata de sostener el pulso y darle sentido a la acumulación de citas. La ciudad se cuenta a sí misma a través de esa continuidad, sin necesidad de elevar el tono. Quizá por ello el lema implícito de este 2026 no sea la espectacularidad, sino la persistencia. Porque reconstruir una ciudad es levantar muros; reconstruir la vida que late dentro de ellos es un oficio más largo, humano y menos fotogénico.

L'Aquila 2026

L’Aquila enters 2026 as Italy’s Capital of Culture with a rolling programme of over 300 events spread across the year, with updates published on the official portal laquila2026.it. The opening is scheduled for 17 January 2026: a formal institutional ceremony in the morning, followed by a large public event that moves through the historic centre in the afternoon and evening, with a central moment in Piazza Duomo.

The year is built around a few clear pillars: visual arts (with major exhibition projects anchored by key institutions), music and performance (from concert programming to participatory and urban formats), and a strong focus on education, skills and younger audiences. Community-based storytelling and artist residencies also feature as tools for participation and civic identity.

In L’Aquila, the “where” matters as much as the “what”. A tangible part of the 2026 story is the continued reopening and reactivation of symbolic spaces, linking the cultural calendar to the city’s longer reconstruction and public-life comeback.

Follow the full calendar, track updates and explore the spaces shaping the year on

L'Aquila 2026