The national meeting “Legacy is Capital: the volunteering legacy on big events”, promoted by CSVnet,held in Trento on 15th November 2024,  saw the participation of various national volunteering organizations,  as well as the “Open Culture 2019 Volunteers” association, established at the time of the nomination of Matera as a European Capital of Culture.

‘Ten years ago it was as if we had challenged geographical latitude by promising that we would be able to navigate extreme latitudes. The question to ask ourselves now is: which latitudes do we want to explore in the next 10 years?’. It was with this message that the director of the Matera Basilicata 2019 Foundation, Rita Orlando, closed her speech at the round table ‘Matera, 10 years of Capital’ organised by the Foundation on 17 October, in Casa Cava in Matera, to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the proclamation of the city of the Sassi as European Capital of Culture 2019.

On 17 October 2014, the city of Matera was proclaimed European Capital of Culture for 2019. An announcement that was greeted with a great explosion of joy in a packed Piazza San Giovanni, in connection with the headquarters of the Ministry of Culture where the Jury was meeting together with representatives of the six Italian cities that were finalists for the title.

Growing as an association at a European level and having the opportunity to show as many people as possible what it means to be part of a cultural volunteering association has always been part of the objectives of the Volontari Open Culture 2019 association.

Since EcocNews has been online, just after the pandemic, we have been doing a series of interviews with cultural managers and European Capital of Culture experts. In this time we have heard from Bob Scott, Steve Green, Beatriz Garcia, Chris Torch, Rossella Tarantino, Franco Bianchini, Shuji-Kogi, Sylvain Pasqua and Chris Baldwin. Today the interview is with Ariane Bieou.