The city of Felicity

Inside the old military Arsenal, in the middle of a multi-ethnic neighborhood in the heart of one of the largest cities in Italy, they have found a place where many children of all colors can play peace: they belong to different civilizations, speak languages ​​and profess different religions, the same as their families.
The Arsenale has become their second home, a space for contact, coexistence, meeting. Open every day, where profoundly different people choose to stay together to form a new multi-ethnic community, respecting the same rules and speaking the same language, that of the country where everyone finds themselves building a new life. The richness of these experiences is the basis of a love and acceptance typical of Christianity with a language and a way that is inclusive of the different confessions to which the families who frequent the Arsenale della Pace belong, the children have invented Felicizia, a city imaginary built on top of a cloud, where friendship is the way to happiness and there are values ​​which, due to their universality, can belong to everyone.

On 26 November 2018, in a moving ceremony at the Arsenale della Pace, the President of the Republic Sergio Mattarella also became an honorary citizen of Felicizia.
At the basis of the city of Felicizia, there is the intuition of the founder of Sermig, Ernesto Olivero, who in line with the recent contributions of the most important pedagogues, has always underlined how important it was to listen to the children, their amazement and their amazement, to give life to processes in which they are not only asked to listen passively, but in which they are stimulated and activated, becoming creators and discoverers of new contents.

At Felicizia we don't talk about Peace, but we try to implement behaviors of Peace. Children, even from very different cultural backgrounds, struggle to conceptualise and abstract; however, they understand very well what it means to suffer an unjust action or experience a deprivation.
From that experience it is possible to reason with them in a very concrete way and find alternative answers to those of hatred and violence.
Starting from the belief that light cancels darkness, Felicizia's training activities aim not so much to bring out the contradictions and injustices of the society in which we live, but to underline the potential for good and change that exists in each person . In this sense, one of the first proposals was to accompany the children in the construction of a utopian city, leaving them full freedom to choose the name and the laws they felt were closest to their own experience.

A city where everyone feels like a full citizen, whatever their origins and provenance: the first mission of the inhabitants of Felicizia is in fact to restore smiles to those who have lost them, helping everyone to become aware that our actions and our behaviors determine the mood of those around us. Even just a simple gesture, or a single word towards another child, has the power to make those by our side feel good or bad, increasing or decreasing the level of peace in the environment in which we find ourselves.
Thus the second objective, closely linked to the first, is to bring children closer to a dimension of empathy and attention to each other's needs, of care and friendship, trying to help them experience, first of all among themselves, relational and affective dynamics that allow not to exclude, put aside, leave anyone behind, through mutual recognition and enhancement of the contribution that everyone can make. In this way, the playful dimension can become an important vehicle for the passage and internalization of contents: play is the natural habitat of every child, the language with which it is easier and more immediate to reach her inner dimension.
 

We live in a society where it seems that nothing concerns us directly, that there is no possibility of bringing about a change and making a positive contribution to the world: Felicizia has become a unique opportunity for Sermig to be with children, not just from the neighborhood , to motivate them with respect to the possibility of being and becoming the change they would like, through choices, actions and behaviors they can undertake in everyday life, starting from the square meter in which they live, from a conscious and sustainable use of the resources they have available, by the quality of the relationships they live with the people they meet every day, in the family, at school and in the other contexts they frequent. Now the challenge is to bring Felicizia into schools, starting with primary school, so that more and more children can discover that peace is truly within reach. An Indian proverb reminds us how important it is to put yourself in the other's shoes: «before judging someone, walk for three moons in their moccasins» . Felicizia wants to make this experience live, at least for the time of a lesson.

Mark Grossetti
Focus - Peace is learned
NP August / September