The exclusive greeting from the new FAI President Marco Magnifico: “Great challenges await us, but I thank you who have always supported us even from afar, demonstrating your love for Italy with concrete gestures”.

Dear Friends,

I am particularly pleased to greet you in my capacity as your new President. I am bound to many of you by the esteem and friendship that I have built up over the years through our shared commitment to the mission that we share, and I am sure that there will be plenty of opportunities to meet those of you whom I have not yet had the pleasure of meeting personally.

As I always say, getting close to FAI means in a way becoming part of a happy family. Not only because what strengthens the bond between its members is a project in which they all participate with conviction, but also, and above all, because of the intensity with which they do so.

I was talking about this a few days ago during a meeting at the Fondazione: if I reflect on what drove the founders to set up FAI and to manage it over the first few decades, if I think about the first delegates and the thousands that today make up our formidable local network, if I consider the dedication of my staff or the reason that drives a donor to entrust his home, his land, his collections to FAI, well… when I ask myself the question “what drives all this?”, there is only one answer: the heart. It is first and foremost the heart that gave birth to FAI, that made it grow and expand; a passion that I can say without too many reservations has also marked my 36-year “executive” career.

My responsibility now is to feed this fire with enthusiasm and ambition in order to lead the Trust to establish itself as the engine of a civil development that passes through the lens of history, art and nature. Of that natural and historical context, in fact the “Environment”, to which we have dedicated our commitment for almost fifty years.

But if today we want to continue to grow in size, authority and consensus, we cannot think of confronting the contemporary context without innovative capacity. This is why the new Three-Year Strategic Plan redesigns our strategies in the light of innovation, sustainability and governance, without abandoning the original values of concreteness, transparency and quality that have always distinguished our work in the service of the country.

Great challenges await us, and I will be in the front line to ensure continuity for the Foundation and to lead it towards an evolution that will establish it among Italy’s leading cultural institutions. It is a demanding task, but knowing that I am not alone reassures and encourages me. I am therefore also counting on you, dear friends of FAI UK, who have always contributed to supporting our mission from afar, demonstrating with concrete gestures your love for Italy and what makes it special in the world so that the world itself can continue to enjoy its unique heritage of history, art and nature.

I am sure that you will be at our side to write this new chapter together, which I hope will allow us one day, looking back, to be proud of what we have contributed to achieve.