Venice was chosen as the regular venue for the Club’s annual plenary meetings from the start. It is the Club’s spiritual home.
Venice remains a key centre of European culture, but more importantly, Venice sits at the centre of Europe, bridging East and West. For centuries, the city has been a peaceful, and neutral, place of exchange and dialogue between merchants, artists and diplomats – irrespective of conflicts or disagreements happening elsewhere in Europe.
The founders of the Club wanted the new organisation to do the same for Europe’s government communicators – inspire them to meet, learn, debate and benefit from their participation in the Club. The Club was honored when the Mayor of Venice allowed it to use the name of the Serenissima for the Club, and the city as our regular venue.
While Venice is the Club’s home, workshops and debates are frequently hosted in Brussels (with the kind assistance of the authorities of the Chancellery of the Belgian Prime Minister and of the European Institutions) and in other locations.
Our main annual plenary meeting is still held in Venice in November or December. Our second plenary meeting of the year and our thematic seminars are held in another European city.
Over the years, in addition to Brussels this has included:
- Athens (2014, 2019, 2025)
- Athens-Thebes-Livadia-Thessaloniki (2017)
- Bar (Montenegro) (2019)
- Barcelona-Seville (1989)
- Brdo (Slovenia) (2024)
- Bonn (1993)
- Bratislava (2004)
- Bruges (1997, 1998)
- Copenhagen-Malmö (2002)
- Dublin (2024)
- Dubrovnik (2023)
- Florence (2022)
- Gozo (Malta) (2010)
- La Rochelle (2000)
- Lesbos (2016)
- Ljubljana-Postojna (2008)
- London (1990, 2017, 2018, 2020, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025)
- Loutraki (2003)
- Luxembourg (2018)
- Milan (2015)
- Nicosia (2023)
- Paris (1989, 1994, 2009, 2021)
- Prague (2006, 2022)
- Protaras (Cyprus) (2012)
- Rabat and Tunis (2022 and 2018) (conferences on migration narratives led by the ICMPD and organised within the EURO-MED framework)
- Riga (2014)
- Rome (2007)
- Santorini (1999)
- Sliema (2017)
- Sofia (2015)
- Strasbourg (1989, 2024)
- Tallinn (2013)
- The Hague (2005, 2016)
- Toulouse (2022)
- Valletta (2023)
- Vienna (2015)
- Vienna-Budapest (2007)
- Vilnius (2018)
- Warsaw (2011)
Most of the meetings (11) organised during the pandemic (2020 to 2022) took place on line.