After all, it is only a window, but looking out to that window has now become a symbolic and important gesture for the artists participating in Festival dei Due Mondi. For the past four years John Malkovich, Adriana Kucerova, Adriana Asti, Claudio Santamaria, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Thomas Copeland, Willem Dafoe, and Matthew Aucoin have had the honor and pleasure of greeting, as Gian Carlo Menotti used to do, the Festival audience from that historic window, for winning A Window on the Two Worlds.

The Prize was established in 2010 by the Monini family, which purchased Casa Menotti to create a museum and documentation center for the Festival. Along with the home, the Moninis wanted to bring back the memory of that gesture, a tradition that has never been forgotten: each year a quality jury selects the recipient of the prize and a "special prize" from among the world-renowned artists and young up-and-comers present at the Festival. The winners are immortalized at the window from a photo shoot that goes to enrich the images in the gallery of "Festival Greats" displayed in the halls of Casa Menotti.

This year the Monini Prize is awarded on July 4 at at 12 noon to Oscar-winning American actor, director, screenwriter and producer Tim Robbins, who is present to Spoleto57, in the role of director, with the show A Midsummer Night's Dream. On the same day, at at 10:30 a.m., the "special prize" goes instead to Italy's top institution in the field of training for the theater, the "Silvio d'Amico" National Academy of Dramatic Art in Rome directed from Lorenzo Salveti, present at the Festival with its student directors and student actors from now seven years old.