50 thousand presences only in the Auditorium with 29 thousand students involved in educational activities and 15 thousand participants in the other places of the Festival.
After that of last year, the XIV edition of the National Geographic Science Festival records another great success, bringing to the Auditorium Parco Della Musica an even wider audience: 65 thousand visitors (51 thousand in 2018, 25 thousand in 2017: a data almost tripled in the last three editions).
During the week just ended, more than 500 appointments made it possible to investigate the subject of the Invention by celebrating the three crucial anniversaries connected to it: the 500 years since the death of Leonardo da Vinci, the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing and the 150 years since Dmitri Mendeleev’s creation of the Periodic Table. A true celebration of Science to which the enthusiasm and curiosity of the 29 thousand students, protagonists of the educational activities, who attended meetings, shows, exhibitions, screenings, workshops and interactive exhibits contributed to immerse themselves in the wonders of genius contributed. And human creativity.
A particularly lively edition in which 10 scientific partners have collaborated, in which the voices of some of the most authoritative protagonists of the national and international scientific and cultural panorama – such as the two Nobel Prize winners for Physics 2018 Gerard Mourou and Donna Strickland, expected today – they have explored the frontiers of technology and innovation, telling dreams and goals of futuristic research, completed or still to be done. The invention was then related to the evolution from the Pulitzer Prize Jared Diamond, with art and the environment together with National Geographic photographer Mandy Barker, with the mysteries of the cosmos along with the National Geographic-awarded planetologist Carolyn Porco and at RocketScientist NASA and Awesome Woman Award 2017 Tiera Guinn Fletcher and even with ethics thanks to Sheila Jasanoff, pioneer in the field of Science and Technology Studies.
Grand success also for the social story of the #festivaldellescienze: the 14 live videos for the events in the halls were viewed almost 130,000 times by 95,000 different users. The most followed live broadcast was the “Planet or Plastic? What future for the sea?”, Which saw the foreign intervention of the singer Marco Mengoni (testimonial of the homonymous awareness campaign launched by the National Geographic) and which alone totalled more than 1,600 hours of broadcasting. Moving on to Twitter, more than 2,400 tweets sent by users with the hashtag #festivaldellescienze, for a total of 17.5 million potential views. Moreover, thanks to the National Geographic Experiences and the smartphone APP, which uses the most modern technologies in the field of augmented reality, all visitors were able to immerse themselves in another dimension, experiencing the Festival like never before.
The perspectives of the most advanced research have been explored through an articulated and multidisciplinary program which, in addition to the Auditorium, has come to involve 47 places including the dense network of Rome’s Libraries that this year also realised the Eureka project! Rome 2019 – promoted by Roma Capitale – Department of Cultural Growth with the collaboration of National Geographic, Italian Space Agency, National Institute of Nuclear Physics and the support of the Italian Post Office – activating 30 libraries and 18 bibliographical references distributed in 15 city municipalities.
Grand finale with the two Nobel Prize winners for Physics 2018, Gerard Mourou and Donna Strickland. Moderated by Marco Cattaneo, at 7.00 pm in Sala Petrassi the discoverers of new interactions between matter and high-intensity lasers will explain to the public the open frontiers between Laser and the future, closing the XIV edition of the Festival with their meeting.
