The volunteer couples who play a role in Anfn have met – from Thursday 31 October to Sunday 3 November – at the Club Esse hotel in Montesilvano for their annual meeting
From Il Pescara
The national meeting of Anfn—the National Association of Large Families—will be held in Montesilvano inside the Club Esse hotel from Thursday, 31 October, to Sunday, 3 November. For four days, Anfn will give voice to the fewer and fewer large families in Italy.
They are the ones who don’t have a Cinquecento because everyone in that car wouldn’t fit. Those who can’t go to the movies – all together – because taking up two whole rows of the theater costs a lot. Those who aren’t often invited to dinner by friends because not everyone would fit in their friends’ houses. Those who pass conjunctivitis and the flu to each other (and it lasts for months). But also those who, despite the difficulties, experience priceless moments of joy, celebration, comfort, and dialogue.
The volunteer couples who play a role in Anfn have met – from Thursday, 31 October to Sunday, 3 November – at the Club Esse hotel in Montesilvano for their annual meeting. Just under 500 people are expected, including fathers, mothers, young people and children.
The program. Two talk shows. The “Two Hearts & a tribe” award and the one for the best family-themed degree thesis. The final evening of the talent show, The big family show. The coordinators’ meeting. The association assembly. There will be many moments that will mark the days of large families in Montesilvano.
The younger children (over 150 are expected, from zero to fourteen years old) will be taken care of by the older siblings involved in the Big Band family, the entertainment service born and raised together with the large gatherings of large families organized by Anfn. In this way, their parents will be able to participate more actively in the assembly meetings.
The themes. “Xxl Families: It’s worth it!” is the title of the meeting. “It underlies – explain Alfredo and Claudia Caltabiano, from Parma, parents of six children (both biological and foster), at the helm of Anfn since 2022 – the invitation to bear witness to the peculiarity (and beauty) of the large family”
An identikit of large families in Italy will be outlined during the talk show – scheduled for Friday, November 1st at 9:00 p.m. – entitled L’ho fatto grossa. Talk in which the national president of the Forum of Family Associations Adriano Bordignon will also participate and which will start from a sociological study involving over 1,300 Italian couples with three or more children.
During the association meeting—scheduled for Saturday afternoon—members will be called to vote on a change to the statute, which will clarify that a large family is defined as a family in which at least three children live.
The issue of the representativeness of minors will also be addressed. The opinion of economist Matteo Rizzolli: «A central problem in modern democracies concerns the aging of the electorate and the resulting imbalance of public policies in favor of older generations. In fact, public spending is mainly committed to expenditure items such as pensions and health care that mostly concern the older generation and less to expenditure items such as education and family policies that concern young people and families. This imbalance is further aggravated by the fact that young people are less inclined to vote and therefore to directly influence the policies that concern them. A prime example is the result of the Brexit referendum, where, if young people had voted en masse, the outcome would probably have been different». To rebalance the democratic decision-making process and finally make it attentive to the needs of young and future generations, several proposals have been put forward. Among these is the vote of confidence, also known as delegated vote or Demeny vote».
Anfn wants to do more: introduce the issue of children’s representation within the associative dynamics, giving more “weight” to the vote of the largest associated families.
Saturday night, the Club Esse hotel in Montesilvano will host the show The Big Family Show, a talent show reserved for large families, now in its second edition. Selected by a popular jury (who evaluated their performances visible on the TvAnfn YouTube channel, with over 35 thousand views and 7000 likes, while over three thousand votes came from the apps of the members), the following will go on stage: Paolo and Marco Bani, Sara Gasparo, Elisa and Aurora Mangialardo, Maria Chiara Monticelli, the Prada sisters, Gabriele Piccione, Francesco Santangelo and the Turazza family.
They will be introduced by Sarah Vescovo and Vincenzo Aquino, husband and wife, and by Miriam Aquino, their firstborn, all from Perugia.
The event is sponsored by the Abruzzo Region, the Province of Pescara, the Municipality of Pescara, and the Municipality of Montesilvano.
The numbers. There are 286 thousand – according to the most recent Istat data – family units composed of at least six people in Italy. Of these, a good part is made up of parents with at least four children.
In twenty years Anfn has connected 28822 families. The largest: the family of Nicola Pergola and Elena Comentale of Potenza, 17 children between natural and foster children, the Martinis Benedetti family of Povoletto (Udine), 16 children like the family of Aurelio Anania and Rita Procopio of Catanzaro, the family of Luigi Simoncini and Roberta Pizzardi of San Giorgio in Bosco (Padova), 14 children.
In Abruzzo, Anfn has connected 2,938 families in twenty years. Among them is a couple with twelve children – Ernesto Pomante and Elettra Balata, from Pescara. And three with ten children: Saverio Fierro and Antonietta Esposito from Pescara and Alessandro Di Blasio and Stefania Di Loreto, also from Pescara. Giancarlo Di Blasio and Fernanda Di Lullo from Montesilvano, parents of six children and grandparents of fifteen grandchildren, are the regional coordinators of Abruzzo.
The social balance sheet. 55 pages, 42 QR codes that link to as many insights, 60 illustrations, two maps, and cards. Anfn gives the numbers. It does so in its first social responsibility balance sheet, which will be presented at the assembly by Secretary Lucio Coticelli. It is the result of a long work done by many hands, especially a self-assessment work carried out by the board of directors and the referents of the various operational units.
«The social balance sheet – observes Alfredo Caltabiano – represents an important tool to evaluate the effectiveness of the activities carried out, not only from an economic point of view, but also in relational terms».
