Through how many eyes you can watch over Naples?

As a young people, as a traveller, as a citizen, for example?

And if we’d try to put all these together? If the sight of a young traveller, with a backpack on his shoulder and a Lonely guide in his pocket should be walked by the one of a young Neapolitan? If, just for one time, the young Neapolitan citizens should play a starring role in the making of images that their foreigner peers will bring home visiting the city? If they should be involved in the daily building up of a new way of living Naples, disclosing it, knowing it, learning together with their hosts to love and respect it?

That’s WELCOME FRIENDS.

WELCOME FRIENDS is the Neapolitan girls and boys dream to affect the destiny of ancient Parthenope, giving directly a concrete answer to the evident crisis of this City, the crisis of its common sense, of its identity in itself. Welcome Friends got the ambition in being an incubator for the best Neapolitan energies, let network wishes and needs, intellections and desires, dreams and wills.

WELCOME FRIENDS is a modern declination of the word “commitment”.

Is still topical the classical formula of a volunteer commitment made of sacrifice, abstains, which seems to bring out much an epic portrait of a martyr than a committed young people?

No, clearly. The attendance of the young people in the civil and social life is, today, discontinuous, emotional, aperiodic, because of its affection of a huge quantity of unbreakable commitments (studies, job seeking, etc.). The challenge, hence, consists in finding out new places and shapes of aware participation and protagonism.

WELCOME FRIENDS is the answer to this challenge, played on the field of a participative tourism. The volunteers involved into the project will be called to bring visiting girls and boys around the City; these ones will be contacted prevalently at low cost tourism places: hostels and B&B, for example. We’re not thinking about typical touristic guides or about standard information services; we’re thinking more about authentic amphitryons, knowers of the real City, sharing with theirs peers a day by day changing Naples, with its sunny places, with the people jam of its clubs, with the beauty of its foreshortenings and with the suggestion of its undisclosed little sides.

WELCOME FRIENDS, therefore, is going to be also the tale, constantly enriched and updated, of a generation and its relationship with the City, a real point of view on a city and on a generation, both deeply mismarked but that don’t surrender, neither give up to change.

ButWELCOME FRIENDS intended to be also a dare, an innovative point of view in the ample world of citizenship, no profit, culture.
We think that a collectivity, in its complexe, be supposed to recognize and revalue the one who choose, even into many difficulties, to spend a part of his time to enhance his community.

That’s why we’re going to ask the world of Universities, companies, productive system in general to offer for free to girls and boys involved into the project a little, but nevertheless important, part of their time and knowledge.

We think, in fact, that to a generation which asks for spaces of freedom, which chooses to live in a community its sociality, would be necessary to offer the maximum access facility to knowledges, culture, mobility.