The YOU DO acronym for Italian Environment Fundis a non -profit foundation born in 1975, on the model of English National Trust and is affiliated to Into – International National Trusts Organization. FAI, which in 2025 celebrates 50 years of activity, is to protect and enhance the historical, artistic and landscape heritage of our country.
This year, on the days of Friday 21st, Saturday 22nd And Sunday 23 March the Spring Fai Days event during which normally inaccessible or little -known places are opened to the public, including historic buildings, churches, private gardens, institutional locations, archaeological sites but also prestigious artisan shops, small museums, theaters, ancient hospitals no longer activities, and many other places that deserve to be discovered.
History of the Italian Environment Fund: when it was born and who established it
The constitutive act of FAI is signed in April of 1975 by the entrepreneur Giulia Maria Crespi – founder of the bottom together with Renato Bazzoni, Alberto Predieri and Franco Russoli – in turn urged by the Elena Crocedaughter of Benedetto, to give life to Italy to a foundation on the model of the English one.
The first donations of goods take place in the two-year period ’75 -’77, thanks to the lawyer Piero Di Blasi who gives a Land on the island of Panareato Emanuela Castelbarco who gives the Avio Castle in the province of Trento and Giulia Maria Crespi itself, which buys the construction site that is restoring the Torba monastery in the province of Varese to save him from degradation. Thus begins the history of the Italian environment fund which, to date, counts 72 goods throughout Italy.
How FAI works and how the goods that protects acquires
The Italian Environment Fund is structured in directions And delegations: at the beginning of 2025 there are 19 regional directions and is organized in 132 Delegations, 110 Fai and groups and 93 Groups you make young people, to which they are added 8 Ponte groups between cultures. The areas of intervention in which the directions and delegations operate to protect and propose the assets to citizens are eight: places, territories, relations, people, education and protection, zero impact, sustainability, civic commitment. Anyone can support and help do becoming becoming partner or participating how voluntary to territorial initiatives.
The assets protected by FAI can enter the fund following donations, inheritanceor management grant by private individuals or public bodies. Thanks to the initiative of Places of the hearton a two -year basis, new places and goods can be reported which are then voted to become part of the FAI. The cultural value, historical, artistic And identityas well as being a value of conservation and return to the public, as regards assets that come restored or redeveloped In order to be a point of reference again for the community.
Fai objectives and values
The Italian Environment Fund finds its foundation in article 9 of our Constitution, which says that
The Republic protects the landscape and the historical and artistic heritage of the nation.
The initiatives implemented by the Fund are based on three pillars:
- there treatment of special places, to be protected and enhanced for present and future generations
- theeducation to love, knowledge, care and enjoyment of the environment, Italian landscape and historical and artistic heritage
- there supervision on the protection of environmental, landscape and cultural assets in the spirit of article 9 of the Constitution, and in the general interest according to the principle of subsidiarity regulated by article 118.
The Italian Environment Fund It puts these actions in place based on values that guide the choices of delegations:
- Knowledge and competence
- Concreteness
- Consistency
- Independence
- Quality
- Curiosity
- Operaoso idleness
As we read on the FAI website,
The collections tell not only the history of art, but also the history of society, politics, science, taste of living, crafts, material and immaterial traditions.
