Welcome

"Touching the sky with a finger" is today an overused phrase: it is often associated with light, ephemeral situations, so that it is no longer able to express what it really wants, to give an account of such intense bliss to be able to bring together also two abysses. In the experience of the Festival we could instead define "touching the sky with a finger" as a real experience of deep beauty.

For twenty-three seasons this is the work that the Fondazione Pro Musica e Arte Sacra is pursuing with passion through its Festival: offering its friends and supporters, the audience that follows the Festival with pleasure every year, the union of two maximum harmonies, one generated by the highest creations of music and one created by the forms of sacred architecture par excellence, made plastic by the papal basilicas.

In the words of two Popes one can trace in a certain sense the "magna charta" of the Foundation. In the thought of Paul VI, who grasped in music the "tremendous and fascinating task" of interpreting, of man, "the aspirations, the anxieties, the thrill of the absolute; to placate the dark crises of thought and feeling with a message of serenity. And in those of Benedict XVI, who, appreciating a few years ago one of the concerts offered in his honor by the Festival, defined music as “the universal language of beauty, capable of uniting men of good will on the whole earth and bringing them to raise their gaze upwards and to open their selves to the absolute Good and Beauty, that have their last source in God himself. 

Therefore, letting oneself be wrapped by the emotions, produced by music and art in this way – and listening, so to say, to beauty surrounded by beauty – is to set off on a journey of the spirit, to explore the times and spaces of harmony, to touch, in a certain way, the sky with a finger. A wealth that the Fondazione Pro Musica e Arte Sacra cherishes with love and spreads with ever renewed enthusiasm, thanks as well to the support of the benefactors who have, as the Foundation, at heart the desire to preserve a priceless heritage of centuries. 

Sen. Dr. h.c. mult. Hans-Albert Courtial

Founder and General President of the Fondazione Pro Musica e Arte Sacra

Knight of the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic

Ambassador of Rome to the World