We arrived at 18th Street, in the heart of New York. We were not sure if we were on the right side of the street, but we soon recognized it: there were several people chatting in front of the entrance, and it is easy to catch Italian words too. It is the Metropolitan Pavilion, a center that hosts exhibitions and conferences, on several floors (“The city is a vertical city!”), and since 2015 it has hosted an event created in 2009 based on the example of the Rimini Meeting: the New York Encounter, this year with the Dantesque title “Here begins a new life”.

We climbed the stairs to the entrance, and in the hall there was already a coming and going of people: many children, running here and there in little groups as if it were their home. We took a program from the welcome desk and started walking around, to take possession of those spaces a little more ourselves. As we walked toward the elevator to go up to the fifth floor – where almost all the exhibitions are: we would like to start with the one on Hannah Arendt – I met Don Matteo's gaze: I'm home! (I already knew it, but I needed a reminder). Now he is in Denver, but he is also from Cernusco sul Naviglio, he is my parents' godson, we are friends and we haven't seen each other for a while.

I followed the explanation of the Arendt exhibit. My husband Robert read a few panels and wandered around, then he confessed to me, “You know, when I’m in places like this, I prefer to meet people rather than see exhibits…”. I agree with him. And there will be many meetings, in just two days (I’ve always thought that Meeting-Encounter was mainly for this, even before the cultural occasions). Two children stop us to ask for an offering: I put a dollar in the box, I’m about to add another, saying “One for each of you”, and the child holding the box runs away scandalized, shouting “But this money isn’t for us, it’s for the Encounter!!”. We went up to the refreshment area, and there we found some of the families we had already met in Boston. One recommends the exhibit on Vietnam: they are stories of people who fled during the war, and who started their lives again in the United States. We decide to go; we read some panels, and after a while we discover that the man who gave us information at the entrance is the curator, one of the protagonists of the stories told: a nice dialogue is born, which reveals that the encounter is possible here too, even through an exhibition.

Or a “meeting” among the many organized on various topics: like the one on Tolkien. Among the three speakers there is a friend of mine; we are impressed by the content, but even more by the dialogue that is created between them, until one speaks openly of his pain for the recent loss of a son to an overdose - and the Hope that Tolkien was able to communicate through the forms of a different world suddenly becomes the substance that supports life. Or the one on Christians in the Holy Land, or the meeting on the Blessed (soon to be saints!) Carlo Acutis and Pier Giorgio Frassati. But also apparently casual encounters, around the spaces of the Metropolitan Pavilion – now also our home, yes! With many old friends, or more recent, or new.

There is a home and even the immense city seems more familiar now.

Miriam, Westerly, RI