Following the technical inspection taking place on February 25, 2022, of the officers sent from the Lazio Region (the Villa’s owner), with the participation of Dr. Enrico Molinaro, RIDE’s Secretary General and Mediterranean Perspectives’ President, accompanied with his assistants Ms. Letizia Demogeni and Ms. Sharon Coccomini, at the Turtledoves Villa (Villa delle Tortore) in Ponza, RIDE organised on the following day, February 26, 2022, an online conference on the RIDE Zoom online platform, about the Center for innovation, higher education, and science diplomacy on sustainability planned at the Turtledoves Villa, with the kind support of the Anna Lindh Foundation-ALF, in the context of the annual inter-institutional Euro-Med Ponza Prima-Med/Pontine Medi-Jer initiative (Fourth Edition).

The participants – such as Francesco Ferraiuolo, mayor of Ponza, the Italian, Turkish, Jordanian, Moroccan, Palestinian, Israeli, German, ALF Heads of Network, Gennaro Migliore, President of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Mediterranean (PAM), and representatives from the Union for the Mediterranean (UfM) – emphasized the significance of the planned Center in reaffirming the values of international coexistence, working together on education, environmental protection, and sustainability, in view of the next event, scheduled for September 11, 2022, in Ponza, and October 2, 2022, in Ventotene.

On March 29, 2022, anhybrid Conference focused on the new EU philosophy for Euro-Mediterranean relations, namely the idea of ​​building a partnership between the Mediterranean countries, covering all areas of cooperation: security, economy and migratory flows. In this context, the renovation project of the Turtledoves Villa may represent a significant step from a strategic and cultural point of view, since Italy has always been the epicenter of dialogue between the southern and the northern shores of the Mediterranean Sea. In other words, the planned Euro-Med Centre project would serve as the symbolic Center of Europe, supporting the new ‘neighborhood’ philosophy.
The aforementioned inspection and debates led to the conclusion that the planned Center should operate according to a multidisciplinary approach with several activities aiming also at responding to the skill/labor mismatch phenomenon, assisting the needs of the Mediterranean youth and women. Conferences and trade fairs, held in the complex of the Villa’s available space with its planned innovative layout, will facilitate efficient management of training courses, shared projects’ elaboration exchange, science diplomacy meetings, and summer schools on sustainable development, in particular on blue and circular economy, climate change, food supply chains, food security, and identitary cuisine, possibly setting up a pioneer experimental first Euro-Med Identitary Restaurant open to all collective identities from the region.