Genius Loci: The Festival That Reimagines Santa Croce

Running from Thursday, September 24 to Sunday, September 27, inside the Monumental Complex of the Basilica of Santa Croce, is the ninth edition of “Genius Loci: Discovering Santa Croce,” the festival curated by Controradio Club, Opera di Santa Croce, and Controradio that each year makes thousands of spectators the protagonists of a singular experience: memory and identity enter into dialogue with contemporary languages, from literature to music, from philosophy to art.

The festival has grown, and it asks us to look further: an invitation to commit to giving value to spaces of identity and culture, experimenting with new forms of community as an alternative to the standardized consumption of cities and places as mere tourist attractions. All of it starts from feeling part of the spirit of Santa Croce — a universal, living place where humanity, faith, art, and thought meet.

Taking in a nighttime concert in the Second Cloister, a talk with leading cultural figures beneath Taddeo Gaddi’s fresco The Tree of Life, or a site-specific performance: there are more than 20 events on the program — including Italian premieres and site-specific pieces — across four evenings and one dawn, all inspired by the spirit of one of the most captivating places in the world.

So the spaces of the Franciscan monumental complex — the Cenacolo, the Second Cloister, the Pazzi Chapel — reveal themselves through encounters with philosophers and artists, concerts, talks, and performances, opening reflections on the present and prompting new visions and new forms of living together.

In the year that celebrates Saint Francis on the eighth centenary of his death, the universal message of brotherhood and peace of the Saint of Assisi is as timely as it is necessary.

Among the previews unveiled from the program, director and actor Abel Ferrara will read Gabriele Tinti’s verses for Francis, joining the spirituality of Franciscan origins to the tensions of contemporary art and poetry; Mauro Ceruti will devote a lectio magistralis to Edgar Morin and his final appeal “for a new civilization of the Earth and a planetary humanism”; and philosopher Maurizio Ferraris, writer Marco Malvaldi, professor and artist Francesco D’Isa, and art historian and essayist Daniela Cotimbo will discuss thought in the age of the spread of Artificial Intelligence, in “The Artificial Genius. Dialogues on Creativity, Reason, and Machines.”

And what if Saint Francis came back to preach today, staging a nativity scene in a supermarket parking lot? Who would he meet? The stories of those who remain on the margins, the lives we rarely hear about, find a place in the collective storytelling of “Poveri Cristi,” a show written and performed by Ascanio Celestini, with music by accordionist Gianluca Casadei.

The program also features the Italian premiere of the Ukrainian duo Heinali and Andriana-Yaroslava Saienko, who take on a personal reinterpretation of the work of Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179) — the Benedictine nun, poet, musician, cosmologist, herbalist, and much more.

In this new project that fuses Ukrainian folklore with the medieval polyphonies of Hildegard — recreated using vintage synthesizers — Von Bingen’s visionary music becomes almost a mirror, seeming to absorb and transcend the horror of contemporary conflicts and the inhumanity of war.

And then, as an Italian exclusive, a moving tribute to the genius of John Coltrane, on the hundredth anniversary of his birth, offered by American musician James Brandon Lewis — named tenor saxophonist of the year — and Chad Taylor, in “Radiant Imprints – Celebrating the Music of John Coltrane.”

Also worth noting is the dawn concert “In Solo” by Alberto Ferrari — voice, guitar, and songwriter of Verdena and I Hate My Village. The artist returns to the stage accompanied only by his guitar, in an intimate, special performance at the first light of the new day.

The event is part of the Estate Fiorentina 2026 program and is supported by the City of Florence.

Free admission with reservation; check the program, updated regularly, at www.controradio.it and www.santacroceopera.it.

Cover: Abel Ferrara and Gabriele Tinti, Voena, courtesy Mattia Zoppellaro.