A very important cultural workshop was born not long ago in Breno, a small town nestled in the Valle Canonica, which combines patronage, passion for the arts and love for young people.We are talking about the “Teatro delle Ali”, which raised its curtains last year, on October 8th, to celebrate the beginning of its activity with a week full of events and special guests. This theatre is the flagship of the “Arte e Vita (Art and Life)” Academy, a cultural centre for artistic formation that was founded in 2008; it draws its spiritual nourishment from the Servants of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Poor, known by the locals as the “Mexican sisters”.Both Theatre and Academy were achieved thanks to the generosity and farsightedness of the couple Roman Zalesky and Hélène de Prittwitz Zaleski. The ultimate goal is to create a centre of excellence for the entire province, and make it a model for Italy; it focuses on art and beauty as a way to express and clarify the human need to go beyond what is visible: to express the thirst of knowledge on the quest for truth.The initiative has been born from an intuition of Mother Luciana Bertoglio, who has been engaged in education in Mexico for twenty years. When she came back to Italy, she said, she began teaching in high schools, and that is where she became aware of how empty the lives of the young were.Luciana Bertoglio, Mother Superior of the Servants of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the PoorI spent several years working in Latin America, and I know that young people there are enthusiastic, and they all have a great will to live. Then my superiors transferred me here to Italy; here I found a big difference between the youth: they are listless and they often don’t even try to discover the meaning of life. So I started thinking about what could be done for them, to enable them to find within themselves the dignity of being Children of God, of experiencing the Christian values with joy: it occurred to me that art could be what I was looking for.And so the quest began, the quest that ends with the providential encounter with the Zaleski family and with the birth of the Academy “Arte e Vita”, which now houses over 400 students from six to sixty years of age, with after-school activities run by 30 teachers. Here you will be able to follow courses in drums, piano, dance and even computer courses. You can choose to learn English or Spanish, but you can also learn how to cook or embroider, how to make mosaics, or how to work wood and iron. So this place becomes somewhere to meet and aggregate, but it mainly serves to promote art in its various forms, and to rekindle the hope in our heart to heal its wounds. Luciana Bertoglio, Mother Superior of the Servants of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the PoorMy main proposition was to find a way to manage the leisure time of children in a constructive, creative and joyful way, in order to help them go through adolescence with as less problems as possible while avoiding the path of violence. This opening also served to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the presence of the Mexican sisters in Breno. It saw the participation of international guests such as The Hillard Ensemble, one of the world’s most popular chamber vocal groups. Presiding over the inauguration Mass was Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, whose family is originally from Val Camonica.Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, Prefect Emeritus of the Congregation for BishopsThe aspect that I like best about this beautiful project is that is seeks to educate, enhancing the individual skills of each person; it seeks to help young people to develop their skills and talents. Our Lord did not do mass-production on us: every one is different, unique and unrepeatable. So the most important thing is to try and help each person to grow.This initiative is also a strong signal in these hard times of economic crisis. It is the need to maintain the culture in the very centre of our everyday life, in order to be able to reshape the future.Fabio LarovereArtistic director of the “Teatro delle Ali”In a time when the theatres are forced to close down, in a time when crisis hits culture above all other aspects of life, we believe that culture is a spiritual food, a necessary food supply for every human being. According to this belief we started to design a program for this theatre, which seeks to include the development of the area as well as other aspects. The Val Camonica is an area strongly marked with and important tradition, which has its roots in prehistory. Here we can find the most ancient rock engravings of Italy. So on the one hand we have the development of the territory, and on the other a proposal of national and international level.White flashFabio LarovereArtistic director of the “Teatro delle Ali”So the theatre becomes the stage of the Academy, a place to propose projects for the schools in the valley, to introduce the kids to prose, music, and dance and generally to all expressions of art.Hélène de Prittwitz ZaleskiWe cannot stop. We have to fight the crisis, to stand up against it and say that, yes, we can do all these things. There are many things to be done with the help from the people of the Val Camonica. I like them, because they are hard people who fight to solve their problems. We have to build something, something solid that will last through time. It’s not only about giving them food, it’s about giving them a building to use tomorrow, and the day after as well. I hope this theatre will last at least one hundred years! The program for 2012 already provides many surprises and some important names. In May we will start with a festival of sacred music that will lead some of the most important musicians on the international music scene to Breno, such as the Vienna Boys Choir (Wiener Sängerknaben), the most famous boys’ choir in the world.  Along with the great performers, there will also be room for the realities of traditional music of the Val Camonica. An interesting project in the pipeline concerns Ennio Morricone and his work about the Eucharist. This work, which was already presented to the Pope on the occasion of the exhibition organized by the Vatican for his sixtieth anniversary of priesthood, will be performed for the first time at the “Teatro delle Ali” in Breno; later it will be performed in Brescia as well. Each performance will be preceded by a cultural meeting to bring the public closer to the mystery expressed by music they are about to listen to.Also in 2012, there will be “Arte e Vita” meetings with leading cultural figures who will come to Breno to experience life in the community of the Mexican sisters. They will share their passion with the kids of the Academy, and do some late-night talk with the audience in the “Teatro delle Ali”. There will be the publisher Alberto Casiraghi, the author of “Il Pulcino Elefante (The Elephant Chick)”, who will teach us how to write a book, but who will also tell us of his relationship with great writers like Alda Merini. There will be the sculptor Pietro Coletta as well, who is famous for his iron works.

A very important cultural workshop was born not long ago in Breno, a small town nestled in the Valle Canonica, which combines patronage, passion for the arts and love for young people.We are talking...leggi tutto