Medieval Festival 2024: "Centuries of Light”
“Centuries of Light" will be the theme of the tenth edition of the Festival of the Middle Ages, scheduled in Gubbio from 25 to 29 September 2024.
More than one hundred protagonists: historians, writers, scientists, philosophers, architects and journalists committed to finally shedding light on the "dark ages" first evoked by Francesco Petrarca and re-launched at the end of the twentieth century thanks to a lightning-fast journalistic summary by Indro Montanelli.
To try to dispel the most persistent of prejudices: that of a Middle Age still recounted as dark, malignant and barbaric. An era so slandered that it does not even deserve a name: the 'Middle Ages' that history textbooks and public debate still confines between the unattainable splendours of antiquity and the 'magnificent fates and progressions' of a modern world forced instead, as has always been the case in every human history, to come to terms with wars, epidemics, daily violence and prejudices of all kinds.
Exhibitions, markets, shows, re-enactments, thematic focuses and educational activities enrich five days of the Medieval Festival together with some special events:
- The Medieval Book Fair, the great classics and new publications, with everything there is to read about the Middle Ages.
- Scriptoria, the event dedicated to the art of miniature and calligraphy with workshops and practical demonstrations by leading Italian and foreign miniaturists and calligraphers.
- Medievalismi: the exploration of the Middle Ages in contemporary culture: cinema and literature, comics and songs, clothes and architecture, graphic illustrations and role-playing games. An imaginary Middle Ages, reinvented, reconstructed and sometimes even disrupted through the new languages of politics, costume and fashion.
- The school of re-enactors, an event designed to valorise, through the analysis and reconstruction of historical sources, the passionate work of hundreds of associations and thousands of re-enactors engaged in every region of Italy in reviving the history and traditions of their territory.
- The Middle Ages for children: games, readings, animations, art workshops and drawing courses for secondary school pupils.