Cristina Ravaglia
5 July 2017
Council Member - Chair of UWC Adriatic
After graduating in law at the University of Florence, Ambassador Cristina Ravaglia entered the Italian diplomatic service in 1978. In March 2017 she left the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation as Director General for Italians Abroad and Migration Policies, a position she had held since 2012. Having served abroad at the Italian embassies in Warsaw and Madrid, and in the consulates in Buenos Aires and Munich, she speaks fluent English, Spanish, French, with a good knowledge of German and Polish and elements of Russian.
Throughout her career she was involved in policies regarding Italian communities abroad, migration policies, bilateral relations with Asia and Latin America and cultural promotion and cooperation with a particular focus on youth mobility. Given her professional and personal background, espousing enthusiastically the UWC movement and its values came naturally to her when she discovered UWC Adriatic a few years ago. She was appointed Chair in May 2018.
I am both honoured and thrilled to be the UWC Adriatic chair. This was the first UWC opened in a non English-speaking country and I feel very strongly about the fact that it rises in an area marked for decades by a real barbed wire border: an ideal location for enacting day after day its mission to promote education as the most powerful force for a better world, for peace, for bringing down walls and for the celebration of diversity.