Culture, when it truly is culture, does not live on isolated events but on returns. It comes back every year, every season, every cycle, and precisely through this return it builds meaning. It does not astonish: it educates. It does not dazzle: it accompanies. It is a silent labor, often scarcely visible, that requires time, patience, listening. And above all, it requires that time not be broken.

For this reason, continuity is a cultural value in itself. It is not an administrative matter, nor merely an organizational issue. It is a symbolic dimension: that which allows an experience not merely to have “happened,” but to have left a trace. When a cultural event spans decades, it does not simply accumulate editions; it builds a genealogy. It creates a language, an audience, a shared competence. It becomes, often without declaring itself as such, an informal institution.

In music this is particularly evident. Listening cannot be improvised. Familiarity with a repertoire—especially one that is less frequented or less immediately accessible—arises from repeated exposure, from recurrent encounters, from the trust that is established between those who propose and those who listen. A festival that endures over time does not offer concerts alone: it educates listening, shapes ears, creates expectations of quality. It teaches, discreetly, that music is not consumption but relationship.

It is in this sense that duration becomes a criterion of value. Not because time alone guarantees quality, but because without time quality has no way to consolidate. Every abrupt interruption, every unprocessed break, produces a loss that goes beyond the calendar: it interrupts a narrative, breaks a line of continuity, disperses an immaterial capital that is not easily rebuilt.

Starting from this general consideration, thought naturally turns to concrete experiences that have embodied, over the years, this idea of duration. The Festival Duni di Matera is one of these. Born at the end of the 1990s, it has crossed more than a quarter of a century of Italian and European musical history, building a recognizable identity within the panorama of early music. Not as an occasional showcase, but as a coherent project, capable of holding together research, interpretation, and territory.

Its strength has never been loudly proclaimed exceptionality, but constancy. Thoughtful programming, dialogue with performers, attention to historical and musicological context, a stable relationship with its audience. Over time, all this has generated something that goes beyond the sum of individual editions: a shared musical memory, a habit of conscious listening, an idea of the festival as a place of depth rather than mere cultural consumption.

For this very reason, the idea that such an experience might become fragile—independently of the causes, which are not the subject here—raises a question that concerns everyone. Not so much the fate of a single event, but the way in which a community recognizes and safeguards what has required time to be born. The fragility of continuity is always a sign: it indicates that something, in the relationship between culture and duration, has cracked.

When a festival spanning decades enters a phase of uncertainty, it is not merely a problem of future scheduling. It is a question about past and present: about what has been built, about what risks being dispersed, about what remains when time is no longer guaranteed. Because what is truly lost, in such cases, is not a missed event, but an interrupted relationship.

Intermittent culture—made of appearances and disappearances, of projects that arise and quickly exhaust themselves—may perhaps respond to logics of visibility, but it rarely builds depth. On the contrary, experiences that endure require a less spectacular and more demanding commitment: they require trust in time, in repetition, in slow growth. They are less noisy, but more incisive.

Defending cultural continuity does not mean opposing change, nor crystallizing the past. It means recognizing that certain forms of value need stability in order to evolve. It means accepting that not everything that matters can be evaluated immediately. It means, ultimately, choosing to safeguard what cannot be recreated from scratch.