From Villa Medici to the Festival

The history of Fondazione Romaeuropa started in 1986, when the Association of the Friends of Villa Medici was founded following an initiative by Senator Giovanni Pieraccini (chairman of the Association and currently of Fondazione Romaeuropa), with Jean-Marie Drot (director of the Frencj Academy) and Monique Veaute, the Foundation’s first artistic director and currently its general manager.
The Association of the Friends of Villa Medici (from which Fondazione Romaeuropa inherited experience and results) conceived and promoted Festival of Villa Medici, an initiative that soon transformed the prosperous Italo-French cultural exchange with a series of live performances and concerts that each year enlivened the splendid setting of the French Academy at Trinità dei Monti.
Right from the outset, the Villa Medici Festival focused on those prominent artists who showed lively interest for contemporary culture. It was also for these reasons that as early as 1989 the Association and the Festival felt the need to involve, in the fruitful artistic dialogue between Italy and France, other European countries as well, firmly convinced that the unstoppable progress towards the construction of the European Union had to be accompanied by a broader cultural cohesion, for a solid European construction cannot stand if it is not based on the awareness and conviction, on the part of its citizens, of the unity of European culture, the founding trait of our identity.
Taking part in the fresh initiative were the German and Hungarian academies, adhesions that opened the doors to two prestigious venues, which have since emerged as the Festival’s traditional locations besides Villa Medici: Villa Massimo, which houses the German Academy, and the headquarters of the Hungarian Academy at via Giulia, a building that stands out for the ennobling intervention of Francesco Borromini. Another of the early participants was the then USSR, which granted the use of Villa Abameleck for important shows.
Fondazione Romaeuropa was thus established in February 1990 and was officially recognised by the Italian state as a non-profit organisation. At the same time, what was then known as the Villa Medici Festival became Romaeuropa Festival, now in its 22nd year.