After the intensity of the opening night, the Festival del Mediterraneo, promoted by Fondazione Treccani Cultura, returns on Friday, July 11, 2025, with a second evening full of emotion, centered on listening, memory, and the embodied word. Once again, the stage is the cloister of the former Augustinian Convent in Lecce, a deeply evocative space and symbolic crossroads of cultures.
At 7:00 PM, the evening opens with the long-awaited encounter between Syrian poet Nouri Al-Jarrah – one of the most prominent voices of contemporary Arab poetry – and Monica Ruocco, scholar of comparative literature and Mediterranean cultures. The dialogue, titled "What Does It Mean to Be a Poet of the Eastern Mediterranean: Rhetoric of the Universal Hymn", will be translated by Fatima Sai and will offer the audience a poetic and political journey through exile, myth, and resistance. In Al-Jarrah’s verses, personal memory intertwines with collective history, historical tragedy becomes symbolic language, and poetry emerges as a voice that unites shores.
At 9:00 PM, the word becomes song. Teresa De Sio, accompanied by guitarist Sasà Flauto, takes the stage for an intimate and powerful musical reading. Her voice, paired with Flauto’s essential and vibrant notes, brings to life stories of women, migrations, resistance, and longing: an interweaving of sound and verse that restores the Mediterranean’s most authentic and popular dimension. Balancing poetry and song, De Sio’s performance becomes a collective narrative, a civil testimony, a shared ritual of listening and emotion.
With this second evening, the Festival del Mediterraneo - Fondazione Treccani comes to a close, having transformed the Cloister of the Augustinians over two days into a space of deep listening and shared imagination. A festival that brought together poets, musicians, scholars, and citizens around a simple yet radical idea: that the Mediterranean, in all its complexity, is still a place where meaning, connection, and future can be built.
The initiative was part of the Armonie del Mediterraneo cultural program, promoted by the Municipality of Lecce, with the scientific and operational coordination of the Agency for the Euromediterranean Cultural Heritage, and the support of TAP – Trans Adriatic Pipeline, Lead Supporter of the initiative. From July 4 to 20, Lecce becomes a Mediterranean city—a living space of cultural exchanges, encounters, and narratives. A program that gives shape to a shared cultural geography, where the sea does not divide but connects, and where culture becomes a daily practice of relationship, dialogue, and vision.
“Armonie del Mediterraneo” is not just a cultural program: it is a project that returns to our sea its deepest soul. An invitation to recognize ourselves in a collective identity—complex and layered—made of migrations and returns, oral memories and written texts, ancient myths and contemporary wounds. A living narrative, built through the power of words, music, and the arts that bring people together.
