Friday, September 26, 2025 at the Column Room of the Caritro Foundation in Via Calepina in the historic center of Trento.
There is no solitude if there is welcome. If loneliness is often linked to a lack of meaningful relationships, then welcoming becomes a powerful form of prevention and treatment. There is no loneliness where there is a community that feels responsible for its most fragile members. Very often, however, loneliness does not arise only from a void of ties, but from the inequalities that break them or prevent them: where opportunities and equal access to rights are lacking, loneliness becomes deeper, because it is intertwined with the feeling of being excluded not only from relationships, but also from the possibilities of fully participating in the community. Welcoming, then, also means justice: reducing distances and restoring dignity and space to all.
For this reason, the theme of loneliness cannot remain confined to a private sphere, to the goodwill of individuals, to small sectoral public projects. It needs to enter strongly into social policies, as a cross-cutting dimension of any intervention. Countering loneliness means thinking about communities guided by public policies that look beyond the small community project.
But how do you build hospitality? How does it transform from abstract principle to transformative practice? In this conference we visit some good practices, where volunteering becomes not only an action worthy of praise, but the solution to a pandemic.
