How the Story of a Former Arms Maker Gives Hope at Sophia University’s Summer School
When war feels like it’s everywhere—in the news, at borders, in everyday conversation—what does it mean to choose peace?
This July, Sophia University Institute invited students and scholars from around the world to Trento–Val di Sole for its summer school, “Today to Be the Future.” It’s more than an academic course: it’s a week to ask how we can make peace not just an idea, but a personal vocation. And at the heart of this conversation stands a voice that might surprise you: Vito Alfieri Fontana—an engineer who once designed millions of anti-personnel mines.
From “man of war” to man of peace
Fontana’s story could easily be read as a parable of our times. As head of Tecnovar, a family firm in Bari, he oversaw the production of the TS-50, one of the world’s most exported and copied anti-personnel mines. For a long time, it was just business—until one day, his young son, holding a company brochure, confronted him:
“Daddy… then you’re a murderer.”
That question cracked something open in Fontana. What followed wasn’t instant redemption, but years of wrestling with guilt, responsibility, and what to do next.
Taking the risk to change
In the early 1990s, amid rising pressure from global campaigns against landmines, Fontana made a choice that cost him dearly: he shut the factory. His book “Ero l’uomo della guerra” (Laterza, 2023) doesn’t hide the hardship that followed—financial struggles, the worry of what would happen to his workers, and the long shadow of what he’d helped create.
But Fontana didn’t stop at shutting down production. Instead, he stepped into a world he’d only known from the other side: he became a de-miner, working with the NGO Intersos in the Balkans. In Kosovo, Bosnia, and Serbia, he spent years helping clear fields of the very weapons he’d once designed.
“Every day, I was able to remove a square meter of war and give it back to peace,” he later said. “It was incredibly rewarding.”
Beyond numbers, real lives
Fontana’s words don’t gloss over the horror. In a recent interview with La Stampa, he spoke frankly about what mines really do: “They’re instruments of terror… they don’t just kill or maim. They keep whole communities living in fear.”
And the damage lingers far beyond the battlefield. Even today, countries face decades of work to make land safe again—an effort threatened by some nations’ decisions to leave the Ottawa Treaty banning landmines. Fontana worries that a domino effect could follow. “It would be a disaster,” he warns, recalling how hard it was to get even partial commitments from big powers.
Why tell this story now?
It might seem strange to make the testimony of a former arms maker central to a summer school on peace. But maybe that’s the point. Real peace isn’t abstract—it’s made by people who change, who risk something, and who keep working when the cameras move on.
As Pope Francis has put it, “war is madness.” The summer school picks up this idea, inviting participants to ask: if war is madness, how do we choose sanity? How do we build peace, day by day, in what we study, what we work on, and how we see others?
A week that asks deeper questions
From July 19–26, students and professors from four continents will gather to share experiences, meet people like Fontana, and explore not only professional questions, but moral ones:
What does it mean to have a “vocation” for peace?
How do we live it when the world feels increasingly divided?
Can personal choices really make a difference?
Workshops, discussions, and moments of reflection are designed to go beyond theory. It’s about listening—to victims of violence, to those who’ve worked to repair it, and to one’s own conscience.
Peace isn’t perfection—it’s direction
In the end, Fontana’s story isn’t neat. He still struggles with nightmares about what he made. But he believes deeply in what he calls “the ecology of redemption”—the idea that even the worst choices don’t have to define the rest of your life.
“I suffer for what I’ve done,” he admits. “But I found a way to turn my experience into something new… a new fraternity.”
And maybe that’s the real invitation Sophia University’s summer school offers: to recognise that none of us is outside the question of peace, and that building it starts wherever we are—even in places where it once seemed impossible.