Dear friends,
Tonight we enter 2026 with the rare and precious awareness of those who feel they have crossed a threshold of history. The first twenty-five years of the new millennium are closing: a restless, wounded, often disoriented quarter-century, yet also capable of generating moral antibodies and new visions.
This era ends in the name of Empathism, not only as a significant post-avant-garde artistic, literary, and cultural movement, but as a spiritual necessity and an ethical response to a world that has too often chosen harshness, blind haste, and indifference as its dominant language.
Empathism has stood with stoic, modern resolve and visionary vision against the countless ugliness the world has constantly presented us: the dehumanization of relationships, the social isolation dramatically exacerbated by the 2020 Pandemic and lockdowns, and what we have fearlessly called the technological Dark Ages, in which humanity, overwhelmed by an excess of tools and stimuli, has not yet learned to govern what it itself has created.
In these challenging years, the Empathic Movement has reminded us that technology without consciousness is noise (just like thought when it is banally self-absorbed, as the countless exponents of the underground and false movement of Narcissism show us daily) and that only profound listening to others can restore meaning to progress.
2025 symbolically ends for us in the Historic “Giubbe Rosse” Literary Café in Florence, a place that is both a living memory and increasingly a laboratory for the future. Here we are creating a true empathic Renaissance, made possible above all by the 350 Masters with whom we share everything, custodians and sowers of a culture that places the human being, in all its fragility and grandeur, back at the center.
Florence, once again, demonstrates its ability to open itself when presented with true growth and culture, reaffirming its age-old vocation as a cradle not only of the arts, but of visions.
May 2026 be a year of continuity and courage: the time when Empathism doesn’t simply resist, but becomes a daily practice, a civil gesture, a shared responsibility. May it be the year we finally learn to use technology without being used by it, and to become human again without nostalgia, but with conscious choice.
Happy 2026: may it be a profoundly innovative and exciting year, under the banner of Total Art and Empathy, and therefore authentically human.
Yours truly,
Menotti Lerro
Florence, Eve of 2026
