Rome, July 6 – George Clooney will be in L’Aquila during this week’s Group of Eight summit to show his support for earthquake victims.
The actor, a prominent human rights campaigner who has a house on Lake Como, will meet locals who have been living in tents at the small town of San Demetrio since the April 6 quake that killed 300 people and left thousands homeless.
Along with Nobel Peace Prize winner Betty Williams, Clooney will inaugurate a new cinema in San Demetrio.
The initiative is co-sponsored by the Secretariat of Nobel Peace Prize Summits, an organisation set up in 1999 by then Rome mayor Walter Veltroni and the Mikhail Gorbachev Foundation.
Veltroni, who recently resigned as head of Italy’s largest opposition party, will be on hand for the ceremony, which is also being sponsored by Twentieth Century Fox, the producers of Clooney’s latest film.
The cinema, which will be called the Nobel for Peace Hall, will house other facilities for the local community.
After the inauguration, the cinema will show some pre-release clips from Fantastic Mr Fox, an animated adaptation of the Roald Dahl classic directed by Wes Anderson and voiced by Clooney, Meryl Streep, Bill Murray and Jason Schwartzman.
This will be followed by the Italian premiere of [ ] Ice Age 3. Clooney, who is known for his activism on the Darfur crisis, joined friend Brad Pitt in an Africa aid appeal at the 2005 G8 summit in Scotland and was handed a special award at the 2007 World Summit of Peace Prize Laureates.
