Silvia Waves Goodbye

Italia Wave head of communications Silvia Poledrini has left the job to join a similar department at the University of Arezzo, the city where the original festival was founded.

She takes up her new post in 2008 and is currently working with Rondine Cittadella della Pace, a non-profit organisation that teaches friendly co-existence by bringing together young people from the opposing sides of countries experiencing conflict.

The logic is that this "forced" but voluntary experience of communal life will demonstrate that differences and reciprocal doubts tend to evaporate when removed from the context within which they have grown up.

"My main activities are concerned with the management of an international hall of residence with students coming from countries that are experiencing or have recently experienced war," she told Pollstar.

The hall was started at Rondine in 1977 in an abandoned church and outbuildings supplied by the then Bishop of Arezzo, Telesforo Cioli, and is currently host to kids from Israel, Palestine, Sierra Leone, Russia and The Balkans.

Poledrini spent six years with the festival, the latter part of it overseeing the media relations during its move from Arezzo to Florence and its change of name from Arezzo Wave to Italia Wave.

She says her fondest memory is that of an Iranian act called 127, whose 2005 appearance at Arezzo Wave was the first time they’d been outside their country.

"We had to go through so many diplomatic efforts to have them play at the festival, and I remember that occasion as one of the most important in my life both from a human and from a professional point of view," she said.