The Europe Challenge Libraries and Communities Meet: Reflections from the Italy Summit

In October, The Europe Challenge 2025/26 began its journey in Italy, where library and community teams from across the continent gathered to connect, learn, and begin shaping their European stories. Over three days, participants explored how libraries can become places where belonging, imagination, and democratic practice take root in everyday life, at the Il Pertini Cultural Centre in Milan, hosted by the Municipality of Cinisello Balsamo.

The Italy Summit was the first in a series of regional gatherings, followed by meetings in the UK and online later this year. Each summit serves as a shared workspace where rural and urban realities meet and where Europe’s diversity becomes a resource for collaboration and trust.

In Italy, the focus was on turning ideas into action. Teams took part in hands-on sessions on prototyping, storytelling and AI visualisation, democracy fitness, and community engagement. Led by Changency and Aarhus Public Libraries, these sessions helped library and community teams refine their local projects and translate them into practical steps for change.

This shared effort reflects one of the European Cultural Foundation’s strategic focus areas for 2025–2029: Libraries for Europe. The initiative recognises libraries as part of Europe’s social and democratic infrastructure, places where knowledge and care meet, where people come together to learn, organise, and imagine shared futures. Through The Europe Challenge, libraries and their communities become civic laboratories where democratic culture is renewed through everyday cooperation.

The Italy Summit showed what that looks like in practice. Teams left with prototypes that will grow through mentoring and exchange, carrying forward ideas tested in Italy to the next gatherings in the UK and online. Step by step, they are building a continent-wide network of libraries that learn from one another and create local answers to shared European challenges.

Rather than reacting to division, the summit participants modelled connection. In their work, Europe is not an abstract idea but a daily practice, a shared table where people meet, listen, and imagine the future together.

The 2025/26 edition is kindly supported by public funding through Arts CouncilEngland, Fondazione Cariplo, the Scottish Library and Information Council, and is co-funded by the European Union.