About us

Luogarìa is a cultural association. We were born in Sannio and we work wherever there is a territory to listen to.

living places | shared knowledge | active communities

We are people who believe that territories — especially those labelled “inner”, “marginal”, “fragile” — do not need to be saved from outside, but recognised, listened to and activated from within.

We do not look at inner areas from the centre: we are inside them, and from there we build.

We work with the conviction that culture is not an ornament of places, but one of the ways in which places stay alive.

And that communities already hold, often without knowing it, the knowledge and energy they need to imagine themselves.

Luogarìa is a light and industrious home for those who want to work with this idea.

Our founding members

Our founding members bring diverse experience in the fields of culture, territory and civic participation.

Alessio Dicuonzo

President

Alessio Zuzolo

Vice President

What we do

We design and carry out cultural, educational and territorial initiatives. In practice:

We promote reading. We work with libraries, schools, reading groups, independent bookshops, book hubs in small towns. We organise meetings with authors, training paths for those who work with books, publishing initiatives.

We build paths of participation and training. Workshops, residencies, schools of territory, activities for young people, teachers, cultural operators, local administrators.

We enhance heritage. Tangible — landscapes, archives, historical and environmental assets — and intangible: knowledge, crafts, languages, memories. We want to bring them to the surface and make them living practice, not a museum.

We build networks. Among municipalities, schools, universities, foundations, associations, cultural enterprises. At local, national and international scale.

We do not look at inner areas from the centre: we are inside them, and from there we build.

Mission

Our mission is to give culture back its role as care: care for places, care for relationships, care for shared knowledge.
Every day we work to: make knowledge accessible and reading a widespread practice; support civic participation, especially of younger people; value what territories already are, before deciding what they might become; build serious and lasting collaborations among those who, in these places, already take care of them.

We do it with method: fairness, transparency, traceability of decisions. Because trust, in territories, is built over years and lost in a day.

Vision

We imagine territories that become centres again. Not to forget geography or the figures of depopulation, but to overturn a gaze: every place, when it is recognised, listened to and activated, can be the centre of something.
We imagine communities that recognise their own value without nostalgia and without flight. A culture that is a shared good, accessible to anyone. Networks of territories that talk to each other instead of all looking toward the same elsewhere.

We start from Sannio, but we work so that every place — inner, peripheral, a margin on someone else’s map — can be a space where staying is a choice, not a renunciation. In Italy, in Europe, wherever there are communities with something to say and places with something to safeguard.

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