The meeting, held at the Civic Centre of Ribolla, a former mining village in Southern Tuscany, was attended by about 15 people, including the presence of the administrators from the Municipality of Roccastrada. Some of the citizens and public authorities who previously expressed their interest in participating then wrote they could not come and apologised.

Summing it all up, the attendance was not so bad, considering it was a sunny Tuesday morning at the beginning of September.

The event was opened by Emiliano Rabazzi, Municipal Councillor of Roccastrada. Mr. Rabazzi brought the greetings of the local Administration and emphasized the value of the subject of the day for his Municipality and for all of the surrounding areas.

Andrea Giacomelli then explained the opportunity related to the Biodiversity Festival at Parco Nord in Milan.

He then switched to “calendar mode” and briefly recalled Attivarti.org’s milestones over the current year.

He also showed that the association’s activities related to night sky quality protection and promotion must be inserted in a context full of projects linked to environmental engineering and land planning which started in 1994. The Participatory Night Sky Quality Monitoring (Buiometria Partecipativa – BMP) is currently the most mature initiative, but not the only one in progress, and surely not the only one in a composite track record.

Some examples were given, including:

• the participation, together with Giulia Ceccarini from Piloni, Southern Tuscany, in the contest of the INVOLEN European-funded project with two location-based games on the Farma Valley;
• the activities related to the promotion of the traditional game “palla a 21/palla eh!” which, some way, laid the grounds for the development of the Participatory Night Sky Quality Monitoring;
• the citizen science coordination work in the ENVIROFI project;
• generally speaking, the mutual relation among culture, environment and free innovation that constitutes the working basis between pibinko.org and Attivarti.org (see also Ribolla 2008, Gerace 2011, Monticiano – Massa Marittima 2012);
• the connection between work “for a living” and volunteer work

He also briefly described the working group who developed these initiatives, composed by people coming both from a “theoretical” world, as well as very practical down-to-earth experts (who are equally and often even more qualified than those trained in school).

Mr. Giacomelli then offered a new version of the presentation on dark sky protection and promotion. Following a format which has been used on average once a month since 2008, with events from Matera, in Southern Italy, to Edinburgh, Scotland, he gave an overview of the issue of light pollution in terms of causes, effects and solutions.

With respect to past editions of the presentation, a specific focus was give to three topics:
1. LEDs, sharing the recommendations about colour temperature and blue light developed by the Loss of the Night European research network (for which Attivarti.org is the main representative in Italy);
2. The Tuscan Regional Master plan for Energy and Environment (PAER, Piano Ambientale Energetico Regionale), which acknowledged some of the observations proposed by Attivarti.org during the public consultation phase. As far as the Tuscan Region is concerned, at this point we may find on page 118 of the document a reference to “night sky as a resource”, and other references relating to this topic, all proposed by Attivarti.org;
3. A brief assessment of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats from the standpoint of night sky promotion in Southern Tuscany.

Finally, Federico Giussani, collaborating with Andrea Giacomelli since last year, proposed the video he edited with some of the shots presented at the Toscana Foto Festival 2015 exhibition in July, arousing significant interest by the audience.

The presentation was closed by the TV report made in 2010 by TG2 (the News at one by the second national public channel). (see link, from minute 4).
The meeting was opened at 10.50 a.m. and ended AT 12.15.

Photo credits:

• model of the mine (detail): F. Giussani
• the audience and the speaker: E. Rabazzi
• Montemassi castle under the Milky Way: F. Giussani

Translation credits: Alessia Carrara – Post-translation adaptation Andrea Giacomelli