Twenty women, twenty stories: using comics to rediscover the people, struggles and ideas that helped shape Europe.
The history of Europe is not made up solely of treaties, institutions, and political agreements. Before becoming an economic and institutional project, Europe was an idea built on the ruins of war, on the memory of dictatorships, and on the need to imagine a future founded on peace, democracy, and human rights.
For a long time, however, this history was told primarily through male figures: statesmen, diplomats, and politicians who came to be known as the “founding fathers” of Europe. Yet many women played an equally important role in shaping the European idea, its institutions, and the values that underpin it today, while often remaining in the background of our collective memory.
This reflection is the starting point for Women Who Built Europe (Costruttrici d’Europa), a comics workshop I will lead in Ravenna as part of EuRoPe LAB, a project by the Europe Direct Centre of Romagna at the Municipality of Ravenna, co-funded by the Emilia-Romagna Region.
Twenty Women, Twenty Stories
The workshop will begin with the biographies of twenty women who helped shape Europe and its values.
Women who fought fascism and totalitarianism, defended freedom of thought, developed new ideas of citizenship, and worked for social rights, gender equality, culture, science, and solidarity among peoples.
They include Ursula Hirschmann, a leading figure in the federalist movement associated with the Ventotene Manifesto; Simone Veil, the first President of the European Parliament elected by universal suffrage; Emma Bonino; and other women who played significant roles in Europe’s political, social, and cultural history.
The aim, however, is not to compress an entire biography into a few comic panels.
I believe comics can be particularly powerful when they identify, within a life, a single moment capable of telling a much larger story: a decision, an encounter, a struggle, a discovery, a defeat, or an apparently small gesture that allows us to understand both a person and the historical moment in which they lived.
Each participant will therefore choose one of the twenty women and create a two-page comic, transforming historical research into a personal narrative.
Telling the story of one person inevitably means engaging with History itself.
These twenty biographies will become twenty different ways of looking at Europe: as a project for peace after war, as a defence of freedom against oppression, as a space for rights and equality, but also as a territory of culture, research, and dialogue.
The Workshop
Women Who Built Europe will take place at the Open Workshop Space of MAR – Ravenna Art Museum.
The sessions will be held on:
23 October 2026, 2–7 pm
24 October 2026, 2–7 pm
25 October 2026, 2–7 pm
4 November 2026, 3–7 pm
The first three sessions will focus on discovering the protagonists, historical research, script development, image research, and page design. The period between the third session and the final meeting will allow participants to continue working independently, deepen their research, and develop their stories.
The programme will also include sessions curated by the Europe Direct Centre of Romagna on the history of European integration, the functioning of EU institutions, and the values on which the European project is founded.
Open Call
The workshop is free of charge and open to 20 young people aged 18 to 35 who live or are based in Ravenna or elsewhere in the Romagna area.
Applicants do not need to be professional comics artists, but they should have some previous experience — including at an amateur level — in comics, illustration, or visual storytelling, as well as the basic skills required to develop an individual project during the workshop.
Applications should include a short personal introduction and motivation statement, a portfolio featuring a selection of previous work, and a link to a social media profile or personal website where additional work can be viewed.
The application deadline is Thursday, 8 October 2026, at 6 pm.
Applications must be sent to:
europedirectromagna@comune.ra.it
Email subject: Candidatura workshop Costruttrici d’Europa – First Name and Surname
If more than twenty applications are received, participants will be selected on the basis of the quality and coherence of the work submitted, previous experience, motivation, interest in the themes of the workshop, and availability to take part in the entire programme.
From Comics to the City
The work produced will not remain confined to the workshop.
The comics created by the participants will become part of the public activities of EuRoPe LAB and may be presented at events in Ravenna–Lido Adriano, Cervia, Lugo, and Russi, as well as at the project’s final event at the Teatro Socjale in Piangipane.
Comics will therefore become a way of bringing these twenty stories out of the workshop and back into public space.
This is perhaps the aspect of the project that interests me most.
Telling History through one person. Drawing a face, reconstructing a choice, observing a gesture. And through that individual story, trying to understand something more about the Europe we have inherited — and the Europe we still want to build.
