The Millennium Jubilee is an occasion to think once more about our world.

This is my hope and at the same time my wish for all the pilgrims and all the visitors to Florence.

My hope because I hope the Jubilee year will give us an opportunity to start again a confrontation with history, so that the word progress may acquire a new quality connotation to define the growth of society. My wish is that from now on we may find in exchanges, in interrelationships, in contacts of peoples, ideas and cultures, nourishment for the future.

Transformations in our society are speeding up. It is not only a matter of global evolution, but the very physical world we are living in is being transformed.
At the beginning of the new millennium there are still large groups of people living in conditions of extreme poverty and indigence, while the gap is widening between the rich western world and a large part of mankind that far from improving is being pushed downwards.

If we look at reality through the lens of human rights we see worrying novelties. The broadening of technological frontiers is now putting ecological balance at risk. Genetic manipulation can distort the very meaning of human biological unity. If, on the contrary, we observe modern society through the lens of social dynamics we see the increase of social irresponsibility; we see uncertainty as the dominant feeling of individuals, communities, the whole social body. Inequalities, a never healed wound, reveal sex differences, growing social stratification, the chronically alienated, the immigrants and refugees who are the lowest and often obscure social strata. But inequalities are also to be found in differences of education, of generations, in the difficulty of large groups of society to keep pace with changes in work, communication and participation.

A new millennium is the time to take stock of the situation.

We look and, often, such as the Angelus Novus by Klee mentioned by Walter Benjamin, we begin to keep our distance from the thing we are looking at. An angel looking downwards in the hope to trace a boundary line, a separation.

The end of this millennium and the Jubilee could help us draw this line. To believers the millennium offers the possibility to look at the past and to read again the Christian spiritual message of the return to earth and the "liberation of slaves" that, ever since the Middle Ages, has marked every Jubilee year.

It is in this re-examination that we can find the universality of the concept of reconciliation, of hope, of brotherhood of the Christian message. It is not by chance that communication between the Catholic world and the lay world in the Jubilee is based upon this re-examination.

The millennium and the Jubilee not only permit us to re-examine the history of the 20th century and its distortions but they also confirm the need to establish once and for all human rights on earth.

My welcome to those who visit Florence is thus a very warm welcome and at the same time an invitation.
I hope that every pilgrim, every tourist visiting Florence will not only stop long enough to appreciate the beauties of this unique art centre but that he or she may feel truly a citizen of the world, a person who uses freedom, brotherhood and social responsibility as his or her personal way to welcome and live the new millennium.

Florence, the cradle of art, wants to welcome pilgrims also by improving its hospitality and welcome facilities, its access routes. Visitors to Florence will find new parking lots, new parking spaces for cars, coaches and buses, new city furnishings and new lighting in the main squares.

New public lavatories, an improved hostel, numerous welcome and tourist information centres will enrich our urban spaces. Monuments will be more protected by new video security systems while the removal of architectural obstacles will permit the disabled to visit ancient churches. Remarkable work of restoration has been completed and at the end of the year 2000 there will be a very important date: that of the opening of the new Uffizi gallery.

Leonardo Domenici