For five years, every year, the Bootcamp has asked the same thing of those who take part: stop. From 29 August to 6 September 2026, twenty participants from thirteen countries paused their year and came together in Palermo and Ustica. They arrived from Italy, Germany, the United States, Brazil, Canada, Lebanon, Romania, Azerbaijan, South Korea, Mongolia, the Comoros, Kenya and Ukraine.
A pause carved out of the year
The Bootcamp is a protected community. For one week, participants, speakers, mentors and tutors live together, and the places that host them become part of the group. In that time they can observe the great movements of the world in their complexity. They can also ask how the discourse on human rights, and on cities, where most human beings live out their existence, enters their own lives.
It is not a holiday. It is a continuous exercise in living together and exchanging ideas, and it takes effort from everyone. The day starts at eight in the morning and does not end until after dinner, with lectures, working groups, silence, shared reflection and evenings of conversation. Nobody watches from the outside: everyone is part of the exercise, every hour of the day.
From the mainland to the sea and back
The edition followed a double movement. The first days in Palermo formed a long introduction, opened by a keynote from Wole Soyinka and a lecture from Eka Tkeshelashvili on multilateralism. Then the group crossed by hydrofoil to Ustica, Italy’s oldest marine protected area, which turned forty this year. On the island, inclusion and sustainability did not have to be forced together: the place held them together on its own.
The final day brought the group back to Palermo, to the cloister of the former Convento dei Crociferi, now the Museum of World Cities. There the ideas of the week met a place being regenerated through culture.
Lives worth listening to
The programme gathered 31 speakers, selected together with UNESCO according to the quality standards its name requires. Among them were Wole Soyinka, Nigerian playwright, poet and essayist, Nobel Prize in Literature in 1986 and the first African to receive it. Romano Prodi, twice Prime Minister of Italy and President of the European Commission. Eka Tkeshelashvili, former Deputy Prime Minister of Georgia and Member of the Nizami Ganjavi International Center. Penny Low, former Member of Parliament of Singapore. Andrea Bartoli and Florinda Saieva, founders of Farm Cultural Park, who in 2010 began the regeneration of the Sette Cortili quarter in Favara.
With them, and with all the other speakers, we did more than listen to lectures and speeches. In the evenings we held the Quodlibet, a practice we borrowed from the medieval universities, where the master made himself available to students on any question they wished to raise. At the Bootcamp the speaker sits with the participants without a fixed programme, and the conversation goes beyond the topic of the day. We listened to lives that are worth listening to: the human side of careers that a lecture alone cannot convey, the choices, the doubts, the turning points.
Three gestures, every day
The Quodlibet is one of three practices that gave the days their rhythm. Ruminatio is silence and personal reflection, the slow chewing of what was heard until it becomes food. Collatio is the evening wrap-up, where what each person reflected on alone becomes a word shared with the group. Repeated day after day, these gestures also teach a method: going deep, leaving room for continuous discussion between different points of view, and starting from one’s own perception of self and history within the community where one lives, works, dreams and plans.
A community that continues
The Bootcamp does not end at the closing ceremony. Participants join the community of Nova Project alumni, which today counts more than one hundred people, with further occasions to meet during the year. Each participant is also encouraged to organise initiatives in their own city, school or network, becoming a local ambassador of the approach built together.
Thank you
We thank ICCAR and UNESCO for the trust they place in Nova Project as producer of this programme, together with the partner cities, the institutions, the speakers, the tutors and everyone who made this edition possible. The Bootcamp is now preparing to set sail for its sixth edition, which will take place from 28 August to 5 September 2027.
What is it all for?
It would be easy to say what the purpose of the Bootcamp is. We prefer to let the participants say it themselves. In the coming weeks they will write it here, and on Instagram we will publish dedicated reels. Little by little, over time rather than all at once, the community of the 2026 Bootcamp will come together again, this time in its own words.
