Festival Francescano 2026

From Thursday, September 24 to Sunday, September 27, 2026, Bologna hosts the 18th edition of the Festival Francescano, dedicated this year to Sister Death.

In the Canticle of the Creatures, Saint Francis calls death “our Sister Bodily Death”: by calling it “sister”, death is understood as an integral and natural part of life.
The Festival’s new visual identity also attempts to engage with the word “death” without removing it, but instead by trying to inhabit it with awareness within our own time.
The Festival Francescano reaches its eighteenth year, an important milestone, not only symbolic but marking a genuine transition. A step that does not break with its history: on the contrary, it listens to it, preserves it and carries it a little further.

The word at the centre
Since its beginning, the Festival has been built around content and the word. Sacred word and civic word, poetic, fragile, necessary word. A word that opens up to dialogue, creates encounter and generates thought. For this reason, in the new visual identity, the choice was made to place the word at the centre, opting for a more essential approach.

A voice from afar
A key element of this change is the use of a typeface that is refined yet human, deliberately imperfect and designed for slow, meditative reading. In a fast and noisy time, this is the choice of a sign that invites pause, depth and care for thought. Because the Festival has never been just an event, but a space for shared reflection.

Lowercase as a cultural choice
The decision to write everything in lowercase is not merely a formal detail. It is a cultural and symbolic gesture. Lowercase is human, gentle and close to listening. It is “minor”, like Saint Francis of Assisi. It is a visual form of the Franciscan humility that has always guided the Festival’s path: not to impose but to propose, not to raise one’s voice but to create space for encounter.

Light and shadow
Each edition of the Festival will have a main colour, chosen from a coherent and vibrant palette. The visual space is divided into two fields: light and shadow, bright and dark. A simple but strong tension, which also visually expresses what lies at the heart of every authentic search: the dialogue between finite and infinite, life and death, fragility and hope.

A change born from memory
This new visual identity is not a break, but an evolution. It arises from respect for the path already travelled, from the memory of the words heard over the years, and from the desire to continue saying, together, words that matter.

The new visual identity of the Festival Francescano was conceived and created by Emmaboshi studio.