The autumn series of events in the Into the Light programme, focusing on the theme of light, opens with a meeting with Franco La Cecla on the theme of sunset.

There is no single sunset: each time, the sunset is modulated by the landscape, the atmosphere, the climate, the season and the viewpoint from which it is observed. We are not accustomed to truly contemplating it because we rarely associate it, except unconsciously, with an inner state.

Conceived as a veritable “course”, the meeting will be divided into two parts.

The first part will focus on the importance of watching and contemplating sunsets and on those who have already done so in art, literature and cinema: from Turner's paintings to the pages of Levi-Strauss in Tristes Tropiques, from Rohmer's The Green Ray to Iosseliani's African tribe, who gather every evening as if at the cinema to watch the sunset and applaud.

The second part is about the meaning of one's own sunset, about resisting or accepting it, and accepting that there is a time when we must “let go” of pretensions, anxieties and expectations and allow things to change and decline. This has to do with the human history of power (ah, the old people in power!) and with those religions (Jains first and foremost) and philosophies that have addressed it.