Hospitality and inclusion: Liberi Nantes at the Gaeta Youth Festival
Hospitality and inclusion through the values of sport. That is the mission which – since the very beginning – has guided Liberi Nantes and the subject which – in the company of the boxer Leonard Bundu, the ex-athlete and gymnastics coach Federica Marzoli and the sports club Atletico Diritti – we tackled on Thursday April 6 at the Gaeta Festival.
It was the right occasion: in the audience, for the event organised by the Vivere da Sportivi association, were many potential conscripts for our army of dreamers, interested in listening, expressing themselves and comparing ideas.
The trademark of Gaeta is, for that matter, a “festival of listening”, created to encourage young people to express their opinions, listening carefully to those of others, and being open to the contrast.
The mission of Liberi Nantes was expressed by our president Alberto Urbinati, who took the mic after the boxing champion Leonard Bundu, born in Sierra Leone with a dad from there and a mum from Florence. Bundu, whose nickname is the “Florentine of Africa”, won over the audience with just a few words: “When I think of home, I think of Florence. When they shout ‘go home’ at me, well, I reply that my home is Florence”.
After hearing his experience, we tried to summarise 10 years of Liberi Nantes – 10 years of hospitality and inclusion through the values of sport. First, a subtle but important point needed to be made. “We are talking of inclusion, not integration. The latter is an idea of adapting, while inclusion is a concept that embraces difference. Different, but united by the same shirt”.
The story then moved to the first steps taken by Liberi Nantes: “When, at the beginning, we went to the shelters to put forward the idea of a team made up entirely of asylum seekers and refugees, people thought we were mad. The boys, on the other hand, got our idea much more quickly”.
From 2007 to 2017, ten years later. “This year we have won the Fair Play Cup for the second consecutive season. So, for the second year, we are the most well-behaved team in the Third Division in Rome. At Liberi Nantes we work on the values of sport: the need to accept the rules and to accept losing a match, to measure ourselves against our opponents and let our values come to the fore. The TV gives us negative ways of thinking about migrants – which in most cases are false – and it is difficult to propose a positive model. Whoever joins Liberi Nantes, though, understands immediately that there are rules. Irrespective of ethnic origin or religion, everyone respects everyone here. And sport is the simple vehicle for spreading certain values.”
Inclusion for migrants, of course, but not just this. “We are trying to carry out our mission in Pietralata, at a historic ground that was falling to bits, restructuring it with the help of boys and girls from the welcome shelters to give back something of beauty to the neighbourhood, and making it available to all of its inhabitants. That playing area returned to the area – the 25 April Stadium – becomes inclusive, therefore, not just for migrants, but for the neighbourhood itself”. To this there is nothing to add. Come and find us in Via Marica 80!
Stefano D’Alessio
