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Our first 26 years
This year, 2010, we are celebrating our 26th birthday. Our association began life in Bedonia, ( province of Parma) in 1984 with the aim of offering youngsters the sort of summer holiday they were looking for. Today, twenty-five years later, we are now based in Ferriere, (province of Piacenza) not far from our original site, and still in the Emilian Appenine mountains.
The choice of a mountain location was not pure chance. The Appenine mountains create a sort of natural, open-air gym; a place where you can feel at ease with yourself, with your companions and with the surrounding environment. Our ambitious objectives have evolved into an annual gathering together of youngsters from all over the world, keen to share their artistic and sporting
talents. The main motivation of these youngsters is their pleasure in sharing aspects of their own cultures and finding out about the culture of others. This must surely give us all hope for a better future.
The starting point of our summer programme was our experience of teaching and taking part in sport. Over time, it has grown to include other things that youngsters have shown themselves to be interested in. So it is that we always have evening entertainment, ecology groups, the magazine editorial group, students taking turns at the daily chores. As Mahatma Ghandi said: Education is about bringing out the best in each of us.
The summer sports school, subsequently known as the Barilla Sports School for 17 years, has gradually extended its area of interest to include sport in its original meaning of amusement (desport) as well as the Ancient Olympic concept of sport. In Ancient Greece, competition was not only limited to running, jumping, throwing and wrestling but it also included poetry, drama and sculpture. All of which expressed the idea: a healthy mind means a healthy body.
Our teaching methods have always favoured helping rather than conditioning youngsters. Using our many years’ teaching experience, we founded the VIVAS project: Living values through arts and sport. The project is made up of teaching methods and good practices that will positively influence the education of youngsters.
At the present time, the most enthusiastic supporters of our project are the young foreigner visitors whose schools and associations take part in our Festival in ever increasing numbers. It is also thanks to them that the summer sports school has gradually turned into the International Youth Festival, according to the principles stated by Jacques Delors, former president of the European Commission: Education would not fulfil its mission if it did not produce citizens deeply rooted in their own culture but also open to the culture of others, so that society can continue to make progress.
In this context, sporting practice has gradually followed the teachings of Pope John Paul II. At a meeting with the finalists of the Youth Games at Castel Gandolfo, he said : Choose a sport that you really enjoy. Don’t just watch it, but join in. Let the tiredness and joy of physical exercise as well as the skills of sport become your way of expressing yourself. Then you’ll see the people around you as team mates and friends, every sports person as your equal, every minute of your life as an opportunity to show your commitment to respecting others, your strength and energy as an opportunity to help those less fortunate than yourselves, your personality as an expression of energy and noble human virtues.
We continue to remain faithful to the ecological principles which apply to the body and mind. Not only are we committed to returning sport to its original values, but we also make sure that all our activities take place in a natural environment with clean, fresh air and water. We have also turned our attention to the diet of our participants. As diet is of such importance to physical well-being, we have made sure that we offer the traditional Mediterranean Diet at our centre in Ferriere.
The enthusiasm of our foreign partners has increasingly lead us to give them more opportunities to exhibit their many and various talents. This has had so much success that we now hold many ‘national days’. On a national day, one group takes charge of organising the whole day’s activities. These days usually include art workshops, traditional games, a show in the evening and the preparation of traditional national food.
So, our ‘participants’ from past summer sports schools have gradually made way for their peers from foreign lands who take part with their schools and cultural associations.
Going against this general trend, last year we had a group from the parish of Corpus Domini in Piacenza. This experiment was such a success that other parish groups as well as local sports clubs and arts associations have been invited to come to the Festival in the future in the hopes of giving young Italians a valid educational experience.
From Summer Sports School to International Youth Festival
In 1984, a group of P.E teachers and sports instructors decided to organise a summer sports school: a place, a programme, teaching methods and activities with the aim of making sport an opportunity for fun, meeting, active participation and holidays.
Our aim was to bring the original form of sport, as in the English word desport, meaning enjoyment, to the attention of young people, their families and schools.
Winning, competition, performance were all aims shared by our group, but they were reaching dangerous levels and beginning to suffocate the enjoyment of playing.
Too many youngsters were giving up, and are still giving up, sport because they are tired and fed up of the way sport is presented to them. We were, and still are, aware that everything depends on the methods used to teach sport; that is the lack of creativity, fun and freedom which tame youngsters rather than making them experts of their childhood and therefore, ready to face and change the lives they are about to encounter.
The choice of a mountain location as an open-air sports ground symbolises the return of sport to nature, where the artificial makes way for the natural, where the pleasure of playing is given primary importance, this is even given priority over learning and training in individual sporting disciplines.
Over the years, attended by thousands of young Italians, we have put together the idea of sport as the ecology of the body and mind, and therefore the affirmation that the fit person is a person with perfect balance between body and mind.
Consequently, we have added a healthy diet to a healthy environment, in which food can be seen as a natural fuel for our physical and mental well-being as well as being appetising. We have adopted the Mediterranean Diet as our healthy eating project ( and this is also one of the reasons that Barilla has been with us for the 17 years of our organisation).
Over the years, the climate of freedom and creativity at the heart of our project, has gradually focussed our attention on the other areas of interest for youngsters.: music, singing, dancing, drama, art and so on. A fostering of a spirit of all-round sportsmanship and taking an interest in the world around them, has lead our students to experiment with a variety of types of movement and sport and to try new artistic disciplines. The evening entertainment slot has turned into a sort of artistic workshop, where a wide variety of shows take place each evening. It is a time when creativity and fun take precedence, so much so that the students practise and rehearse intensely so as to give their best performances.
This was the start of the idea of the Youth Festival, to show that the word sport had returned to the origins of its meaning: in antiquity, The Olympic Games included athletics, wrestling, pancratium as well as drama, music and poetry. We reached this stage very gradually, thanks to the fact that we have never imposed a timetable of activities on our students, but have always preferred to leave our students space and time for their initiatives and creativity. It is in this spirit that we, the teachers, have always liked to see our role as ‘facilitating’ rather than ‘conditioning’. In other words, we have always tried to create conditions in which the youngsters can express themselves. Attentive but unobtrusive, we give each individual the opportunity to discover their own talents and to be recognised for the values they express and be applauded for them. This formula has lead us to internationalise our organisation and make it a real Festival of Youth.
The international language of sport and art has ensured that many cultural groups from all over the world have joined in our network and shared our way of thinking. Youngsters from all over the world come to Italy intent on showing their skills and abilities and sharing them with others, in the spirit of our mission statement:’ favouring the bringing together of young people and the exchange of world cultures with the intention of improving understanding and reciprocal respect in a climate of fun and friendship.’
Maestro di Sport Carlo Devoti
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