The project is motivated by an urgent cultural-policy need: how to build a Europe of citizens in which Europeans can recognise intellectually, ideally and emotionally that they are members of a common civilisation.As an area of emotions, ideals and criticism (self-criticism), literature seems in this regard to be highly significant. Each European country has established its own political and conceptual paradigm, and hence its own literary canon. Building a Europe of citizens means - starting with school and university teaching - going beyond the national paradigms to recognise all that is common and exploitable within each paradigm and what is perceived and recognised by other Europeans as common and significant for a European education. This means seeking to define a "canon" of European literature that does not replace national canons but rather supports them on a level of complementarily and dialectics, thus giving rise to a concrete intercultural dialogue. From this standpoint, with respect to the school institutions of the partner countries, we will arrive at a range of European canons interrelated with the various national cultures, accompanied by the identification of multiple approaches (thematic, by type, literary genre; literature and cinema, theatre, music, arts ). In this set of activities a collect of cultural and didactic suggestions both in printed and in multimedia support will be produced by the partnership. And because getting people accustomed to reading is easier than getting them re-accustomed, one session of the works, in cooperation with public-school teachers, will be dedicated to a canon of children's and adolescent literature. The project does not start from zero, and the partnership will make use of existing connections. In fact the coordinator has undertaken international research on these topics, which in 2007 led to a conference featuring more than 40 university professors from 14 countries and a lot of school teachers.