The Peace Education Campus was born in the summer of 2016 in the district of the extreme southern outskirts of Milan, Gratosoglio, and wanted to be, from the beginning, a symbolic action, a start of a dialogue process in the district, a laboratory of peace, between young people and adults of different ethnic and religious compositions after the bloody attacks carried out in Paris in the autumn of 2015 put a strain on the already difficult coexistence in the neighborhood between indigenous citizens and new citizens, especially Muslim ones.

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The proposal, in that summer, was spread over a week of coexistence for teenagers and young Christians and Muslims in the spaces of the oratory of the Parish of the Neighborhood and in some points of the city of Milan where to live shared experiences of reflection, of sports, visits to exhibitions and museums and where to meet credible witnesses of dialogue. Together with the young citizens of the district, some young people from the city of Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, were present as special guests, second generation witnesses of how prejudice and separation can lead a nation beyond the brink of the abyss.  

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However, over time, while the intuition became a project, we realized the value of opening the proposal to young people from other parts of the city.  and from different European origins, in particular from the tormented Parisian banlieu of Saint-Dènis. This meeting proved to be fruitful with new thoughts and the spread of practices (a campus of peace was born in 2018, albeit limited in time) and allowed our neighborhood, isolated on the outskirts of the big city, to open unexpectedly and become for a week the heart of a young Europe that dreams and practices peace and breaks down invisible and persistent walls between people of different cultures and religions but also in our city, between the center and the periphery.

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Finally, the peace campus was the point from which personalities from the political, religious and social world such as Prof. Romano Prodi or Cardinal Angelo Scola or Don Luigi Ciotti, Latifa Ibn Ziaten and Sultana Razon passed. The Peace Campus has always been held under the patronage of the Municipality of Milan and also, in the 2017 edition, with the patronage of the Cariplo Foundation and, in 2018, with that of the United World Foundation at the Holy See.

We are convinced that we have proposed an experience that has been able to activate thought through the thematic study of some social phenomena, geopolitical issues, historical episodes and current events; passion and emotion through mutual listening in focus groups, sharing time and space between young people from different backgrounds and listening to lifestyles given in the testimonies or through theatrical practices and workshops in general and finally action by pushing young people to take responsibility with a symbolic commitment of volunteering to be replicated in the daily life of one's own city.

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The serious situation that has arisen with the spread of Sars-Cov2 and the isolation in which we are still forced, does not allow us to plan a VI edition in the presence of the Campus but the desire to involve the new generations above all in the search for peace and of dialogue and the desire that the agora in which to ignite confrontations and let gestures of encounter and cultural processes happen, has pushed us not to fix webinar events that are difficult to attend but to create a platform that, if on the one hand it can collect even small gestures and peace projects, on the other hand make them usable, disseminate them and, as far as possible, open the intelligence to a possible and eventual modeling from one periphery to another.