The unusually cheerful atmosphere of this celebration of Italian culture: a full hall of guests, emotionally and intellectually intense performances, an elegantly decorated audience in the colors of the Italian tricolor and a lot of music should be noted immediately, in general — bellissimo!

The event brought together Italian language lovers from all over the city. The participants are members of "Dante Alighieri", teacher Marcello Messina from SFedU Institute of History and International Relations and university students. The latter are special: now there are only two groups studying Italian at SFedU. The guests also gathered a variety of people: invited from the Conservatory and the College of Arts, students of DSTU, students of Rostov gymnasium No. 36.

The event was opened by Natalia Chigridova, PhD in Philology, Associate Professor of the Department of Romance Philology and head of the Italian Cultural Center Dante Alighieri in Rostov-on-Don. In her bilingual speech — in Italian and in Russian — Natalia Yurievna enthusiastically told about the melodiousness of the Italian language and about Lomonosov's words about it, remembered the famous Italophiles — Batyushkov, Pushkin, Gogol and Akhmatova, read Mandelstam's verse about the Italian language.

After this mini-lecture, singers from the Conservatory performed Rachmaninoff. They duetted Volare to the accompaniment of a guitar.

The event was continued by Maria Naryshkina, Ambassador of the Dante Alighieri Society. She presented the Giovani ambasciatori della Dante program, talked about the center, achievements and her participation in this program.

The informative part of the evening continued: the presentation "The Italian Diaspora in the South of Russia" was made by students of the International Faculty of the Southern Federal University. They highlighted the contribution of Italians to the architecture of Russia: They showed bridges, churches and monuments.

"Are there any representatives of the Italian diaspora in the hall now?"  Natalia Chigridova asked.

In response, Michele Del Mastro, the owner of the Rostov cafe I Fratelli, came out with a speech. He shared his joy that every year more and more people come to the Italian language week.

Then the guests of the evening enjoyed the work of philologists and linguists of SFedU. 4th year students Ilya Grigorenko, Deniz Temirov, Elizaveta Artemova, Sofia Egorova, Alina Gladush, Victoria Golovataya, Tatyana Ivanova, Polina Varzhel and 2nd year students Roman Efimov, Alexandra Novikova, Margarita Sukhariyan, Yulia Kalashnikova, Milena Pashayan performed scenes in Italian on the theme "The Light that the Italian language brings to us". They showed a large Italian family, whose members share their preferences in literature. It turned out that Italians read everything: European authors, detective stories, Russian classics and, of course, the Divine Comedy. After the scenes, the students all performed the song Gelato Al Cioccolato together.

The final part of the evening is musical. The musicians of the conservatory performed Parlami d'amore, Mariù, Publius' Aria from The Mercy of Titus and Volare, but already as an opera.

The last speaker was Marcello Messina, a lecturer at SFedU. He sang songs of his own composition to the guitar and accompaniment of Vladimir Snezhko: about Russia, about his son and "about the hostel". There were three languages in the songs: Italian (the main one), Russian and Portuguese.

The evening ended with the presentation of gifts: students were awarded membership cards of the Dante Alighieri club, other participants of the event received souvenirs and letters of thanks.