The second edition of the MITO SettembreMusica music festival promises to be even stronger and more broad-based than the boldly pioneering first edition. That edition came to be thanks to streamlined decision-making and was lauded as a success. For anyone who failed to realize the festival's extraordinary potential, MITO SettembreMusica 2007 turned out to be the unarmed prophet of the grand season marked by the 150th anniversary of the Unification of Italy and Expo 2015. Eschewing timidity and limitation, this called for thinking big, which inevitably led to planning beyond mere municipal confines. Thus, MITO SettembreMusica comprises in a single dream, in a single sound, the cities of Torino and Milano, and infects smaller outlying cities, such as Alessandria, Bergamo, Bollate, Bose di Magnano, Cremona, Lecco, Moncalieri, Monza, Morbegno, Novi Ligure, Pavia, Rivoli, Susa, Venaria.
Indeed, the first edition of MITO SettembreMusica exceeded everyone's expectations, also in terms of the balance and blending of the two main host cities' capacities. Beyond the exploitation of local characteristics, combining the energy of cities leads to unpredictable outcomes. The experience of MITO SettembreMusica has given shape to projects, ideas and aims that had been circulating for years, and which had gone unfulfilled. Today we can speak freely of new and lasting bonds created between service companies, banks, symmetric cooperation among the events of 2011 and 2015, as well as other opportunities that are useful for our two communities, now enhanced by the upcoming activation of high-speed connections. But before MITO SettembreMusica became a stellar reality traveling at even higher speed, in the breath of its very first edition, attitudes and points of view were not so natural.
It turns out that the people who saw the new-born international music festival as not merely a cultural event, but as something more important and profound, were right. In this they must be given credit, because truly, music is a form of language that brings people together and literally moves us from one place to another - emotionally and physically. As the second edition of MITO SettembreMusica inevitably moves from experience to consolidation, this year's festival, making the most of the three decades' worth of Torino-based Settembremusica festivals that laid the groundwork for the celebrations at hand, is the result of careful and unhurried planning and preparation, somewhat in contrast to the hectic pace of last year's deployment activities. MITO SettembreMusica 2008 assures even greater focus on the international scene, as a big, wide-ranging festival must, with more than 200 high-level performances, offering concert-goers spectacular encounters with two of Europe's most culturally endowed cities, as they make contact with the history, the monuments and the traditions of Milano and Torino. Which brings us to yet another pleasing result of the hard work put into the previous year's edition - or the effects of MITO SettembreMusica beyond the music sector. MITO SettembreMusica has provided a virtual feast for university research and communications experts, and has served as a positive model for dialogue among urban centers. New ideas and proposals have come to the fore based on such a model, not only within the contexts of the two host cities, but in a variety of locations and contexts. May this year's edition of MITO SettembreMusica succeed in the noble mission of making the method that has led to the creation of this festival even more convincing and exemplary.