An address by the Dalai lama and the presentation of the 2007 Peace Summit Award to American actors George Clooney and Don Cheadle will be the highlights of this year's World Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates.
The 8th edition of the summit will be held in the Italian capital from December 13 through 15.
This year's theme is 'The Next Generation' and will center on topics which focus on children, including their exposure to AIDS and the phenomenon of child slavery.
Hosting this year's summit will be Rome Mayor Walter Veltroni and former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev.
The Rome Nobel peace summit initiative began eight years ago, the brainchild of the peace-promoting Gorbachev Foundation which the ex-Soviet president set up in 1992.
Clooney and Cheadle won this year's summit prize for their efforts on behalf of Darfur and for their ''commitment to saving human lives and alleviating the suffering of civilian victims of the conflict''.
Over the past two years, the two actors have visited the war-torn region in Sudan to draw attention to the plight of war refugees there.
They have also used their celebrity to speak to government leaders about the tribal and ethnic conflict there and both took part in last year's award-winning documentary Darfur Now.
Past winners of the award have included musicians Peter Gabriel, Bob Geldof and Yusuf Islam, formerly known as Cat Stevens.
The address by the Dalai Lama, who won the Nobel peace prize in 1989, has drawn an enormous amount of attention and the venue had to be moved to a larger audience hall to accommodate the flood of requests to attend the talk.
The Dalai Lama's attendance has been criticised by the Chinese government which accused the exiled religious leader of wanted to ''recreate a cruel slave state in Tibet''.
His scheduled meeting with Pope Benedict XVI has also been criticised by Beijing.
The Rome summit is attended not only by those who have won the Nobel peace prize but also by prominent people from the world of politics, culture and science who work in the interest of a better world.
Among the laureates who have come to Rome in the past are: former Polish president Lech Walesa, who won the Nobel in 1983; 1976 winner Mairead Corrigan Maguire, who campaigned for peace in Northern Ireland; Israeli President Shimon Peres, who won the Nobel in 1994; former South African president Frederik Willem de Klerk who shared the 1993 Nobel with Nelson Mandela for his role in the ending of apartheid; and Mohammed El-Baradei, the Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) who won in 1995 together with the IAEA.
