On January 30th, the solemn setting of the Hall of Coats of Arms at the Archbishop's Palace served as the backdrop for the first public event of our year as Mediterranean Capital of Culture and Dialogue. The meeting "FAI Bridge Between Cultures" (FAI Ponte tra culture), promoted in synergy with the FAI Basilicata Regional Presidency, represented the operational translation of one of the pillars of our dossier: the idea that cultural heritage is not an inert repository of memories, but an active device for social cohesion and new citizenship.

The Ontology of Mathera: Between Rock and Welcome To understand Matera's vocation to become a platform for dialogue in the Mediterranean, it is necessary to interrogate the very morphology of the territory, which is simultaneously geology and destiny.

In her speech, the Regional President of FAI Basilicata, Rosalba Demetrio, offered the audience an archetypal reading of the city, describing it as a living entity capable of containing the opposites that characterize the Mediterranean identity: 
"Mathera was born from rock and water. It is strong and tender, a bit lunar and a bit solar, Mediterranean. It loves contrasts, the darkness of the deep Earth that generated it and the light of the Sky towards which it reaches out. It has been loved, punished, saved. But it still has the desire to live and hold the world in its embrace as it did in the past, as it would like to in the future. It is a mother who sorrowfully watches her children leave. It is a woman who still powerfully seduces. It is Mathera."

This "mother of stone," accustomed over millennia to transforming scarcity into a resource and caves into community architecture, offers itself today as a physical and symbolic space for a new embrace of the world.

From Theory to Practice: The Matera 2026 Method If historical identity provides the roots, it is in strategic vision that the future is drawn. Rita Orlando, our Director General, traced the line connecting cultural heritage to the "Terre Immerse" vision: intercultural dialogue cannot be reduced to rhetoric but must become the infrastructure of relationships.

Matera Mediterranean Capital of Culture and Dialogue 2026 arises from the idea that dialogue is not an abstract concept, but a daily practice traversing territories and communities. In this sense, initiatives like FAI Ponte tra culture fully capture the spirit of the project, because they work on an idea of heritage that does not concern only places and cultural assets, but involves people, stories, skills, and belongings inhabiting the city.

Heritage as a Space for Re-semantization The value of the "Bridge Between Cultures" project lies in its ability to dismantle the passive consumption of cultural assets. Through the training of artistic-cultural mediators of foreign origin, the places of our history are re-semantized by new gazes. Heritage thus becomes a ground for equal encounter, where those who have been welcomed become, in turn, narrators and custodians of the collective memory.