Loved by poets and travellers in every age, visited by millions of tourists enchanted by the its beauty - Italy boasts the most extraordinary heritage of art, nature and culture in the world.
This astonishing wealth comprises, together with the famous monuments known to one and all, hundreds of often "hidden" jewels that run serious risks of deterioration and suffer the ravages of time and man.
It was precisely to save, protect and manage for society as a whole such incomparable testimony of art and nature that, on 28 April 1975, Giulia Maria Mozzoni Crespi, Renato Bazzoni, Alberto Predieri and Franco Russoli signed the deeds of constitution and the statutes of FAI - The National Trust for Italy: a trust set up on the model of the National Trust in England.
FAI is a reality founded through the enthusiasm of a small group of people - with the precise purpose of helping to protect, preserve and valorise the Italian artistic and environmental heritage - yet in just a few years became a passionate, delicate and complex mission.
A private, non-profit trust, FAI receives sites of historic, artistic and naturalist value through donations, bequests or loans for use, restores them, opens them to the public and ensures that everyone can enjoy them.
Our heartfelt thanks go to the support of 60,000 Members, to the "FAI 200" group of "Order of Merit" members, to the sponsors who from time to time link their names with our various activities and to everyone whose donations or bequests have helped us over time.
Yet FAI does not merely acquire and protect its heritage sites. In the awareness that we must protect what we love and that we love what we know, education and information about protecting the environment and the artistic and monumental heritage have always been one of the statutory tasks of the Foundation. An undertaking that for more than ten years has culminated in the FAI Spring Days