Dear Minister of Foreign Affairs Antonio Tajani, we are at the second act:open letter, part two. After weeks, there are knots that we cannot untie and that deeply touch the civil and cultural conscience of our country.
We cannot do it despite the contacts made with the ministry and the timely communications about the dialogue between Italian diplomats and the alleged responsible parties for the blocks affecting certain categories of students being evacuated from Gaza.
One, very serious and still unresolved, concerns the exclusion of those studying art, entertainment, cinema, theater, music, and those who have obtained a scholarship for academic diploma courses at the institutions of Higher Artistic and Musical Education (Afam) – recognized and accredited by the Ministry of University and Research (Mur) – from the right to leave Gaza to reach Italy.
THE EVACUATION LISTSIupals continue to exclude all scholarships and enrollments of Palestinian students who do not fall under the approval of the Conference of Rectors of Italian Universities. It is an administrative choice that carries the weight of a condemnation: an invisible discrimination that affects precisely those who safeguard the creative and symbolic memory of a people.
Art is the language with which a wounded people tells its story, processes pain, imagines freedom. Denying artists the opportunity to continue their education means interrupting the transmission of memory and creativity of an entire country. It means amputating the voice of those who, through music, images, and words, keep the light of humanity alive even under the rubble.
Abd is a young musician who, over the past two years, has recorded his compositions using his cell phone, covering the microphone with a handkerchief to muffle the deafening noise of the explosions that have surrounded his daily life. He has been invited to participate in online international festivals, but he has never had the chance to travel.
SARA TELLS GAZAwith a makeshift video camera. He films life in the shelters, hands kneading bread, children drawing the sea they can no longer see. He publishes his videos online, without calling himself a journalist or influencer: "I just want to be a director – he says – to collect human experiences and give them back to the world."
He has thousands of followers who write him words of encouragement, but he continues to live in an almost permanent blackout, amidst unstable connections and constant fear.
Manar plays on a silent plastic keyboard. He rests his fingers on the fake keys, closes his eyes, and cries. The music, in his mind, continues to flow clear, even though around him there is only the noise of drones. He lives in a tent with his mother and three brothers. He hasn't touched a real piano in two years. "Sometimes I dream of playing and hearing only the silence that precedes the first note," he writes.
Maher was a theater teacher. He studied abroad, believing in the power of the stage as a tool for healing and freedom. Upon returning to Gaza, he founded a small theater workshop for children traumatized by war. He had them read Greek authors, made them laugh with mime, and helped them invent new words for pain.
His theater no longer exists today: it was destroyed by a bombing. But Maher continues to teach, reciting poetry among the ruins for those who remain.
These are stories that speak for themselves. Art, music, theater, cinema, and writing are tools of collective survival, and their denial is a subtle form of annihilation. Every young Palestinian artist trapped in Gaza represents a fragment of a voice that will no longer be able to tell its story, a project of flight suspended in the void.
Culture is an integral part of reconstruction: without it, no peace will be possible. Artists and intellectuals are ambassadors of beauty and freedom, guardians of the identity of peoples. Defending them means defending civilization itself.
THE WRITERSPalestinian writers, directors, poets, musicians, art and theater teachers, aware of the risks of imprisonment and death, have never stopped creating, teaching, writing, singing, acting – keeping the voice of Palestine alive.
They represent the brightest part of a wounded society: the testimony that life, even in the most devastated places, always seeks a form, a rhythm, a color to continue to exist. It is from these voices that we must start in the reconstruction of Gaza: ensuring them freedom of movement, the right to education, and decent living conditions, so they can continue to work and contribute to the cultural, civil, and political rebirth of the future State of Palestine.
THE RECONSTRUCTIONof Gaza cannot happen without valuing those who give voice to culture. Without them, Gaza would be reduced to a mere pile of rebuilt rubble.
It is art – we Italians know this well – that has the power to imagine the future, even when it seems that the last light has gone out in the darkness. Art is the spark that can reignite hope, transforming pain into creativity and desolation into new horizons.