The following article was written by Rising Leader, Mehreen Khan, who represented Aspen UK at the Aspen Institute Italia Seminar on Leadership, (de-)Globalization and the Quest for Common Values (Castelvecchio Pascoli – Lucca (Italy), April 10-13, 2025)
I had the privilege of attending my first in-person Aspen experience at Il Ciocco, in the Tuscan mountains, this April. It’s one I’m unlikely to forget in a hurry.
The seminar topic of leadership, (de)globalisation and the quest for common values, could not have come at a more poignant time.
As an economics journalist, I had spent the start of the week watching globalisation as we know it come apart at the seams. In the days prior, Donald Trump’s tariffs had caused mass financial panic and forced the president into a retreat. As Trump stepped back from the brink, I boarded my flight to Italy. The quest for common values and the impermanency of free trade and global cooperation were front and centre of my mind.
But I soon learned that the seminar was not going to be a rehashing of the noise and bluster of today’s politicians or their ideas about how to run a country or an economy. Rather, the next three days were an immersion into the topics of prophethood, pantheism, ideas about the good life, human consciousness, and design language, among many others — all interspersed with the personal tales of my seminar colleagues.
One moment that will stay with me is our discussion of the speeches of Pope Francis and his spiritual guide, St Francis of Assisi, in what ended up being the last few days of his papacy. It was a powerful and challenging exercise of confronting the settled past, a present in flux, and the fog of what lies in the future. It was a quintessentially “Aspen experience”.
Rather than pulling me back into the endless news cycle, my time at Il Ciocco was a personal and professional escapism that left me feeling reinvigorated to go back to my newsroom. Through the texts — which ranged from 18th-century works of moral philosophy to stories of life behind the Berlin Wall — I was reminded that this too shall pass. I learnt about the Institute’s founding figures, who withstood the pressures of fascism, and Castelveccio Pascoli’s role in tying together Italians and their diaspora in the US.
It was a privilege to be able to take home this message about fortitude and leadership with Aspen Italy, and an experience I won’t hesitate to recommend to all.