Montreal’s Italian Week is a cultural festival unfolding throughout the city, celebrating the beauty and diversity of Italy. This celebration offers more than half a million festival-goers a wide variety of shows and activities featuring art, music, gastronomy, fashion and Italian folklore. The events of the 26th edition of the festival will take place from August 9th to the 18th.
As part of Montreal’s Italian Week, activities will be offered to festival-goers in several neighborhoods throughout the city. There will be concerts, a theater performance, opera, car shows, a film festival and many other events.
This year’s program will showcase Italian cinema through documentary and fiction films, shorts and features, presented at the Casa d’Italia, the Leonardo da Vinci Centre and Concordia University. As part of these screenings, Montreal’s Italian Week teamed up with Le Petit Septième to present the trilogy of short films, “Three Portraits of Italo-Montrealers of Yesterday and Today” on Friday, August 9 at 7:00 pm at the Casa d’Italia. Directors Roberto Zorfini and Giovanni Princigalli will be present for a discussion following the screening.
In addition, the feature-length documentary Montecassino, which explores the Battle of Monte Cassino during the Second World War, will premiere on Saturday, August 10 at 7:00 pm at the Leonardo da Vinci Centre. Director Anthony Sarracco will be accompanied by some of the leading actors of the film to participate in a discussion that will follow the screening.
During the festival’s final weekend, Friday, August 16th through Sunday, August 18th, on Saint-Laurent Boulevard in Little Italy, there will be a host of cultural and gastronomic activities with exhibitions, a dessert contest, car show, the Moda Sotto le Stelle fashion show, as well as many shows, including performances by Peppe Voltarelli and Marco Calliari. To close the 26th edition of Montreal’s Italian Week, Ruggero Leoncavallo’s opera Pagliacci, accompanied by the symphony orchestra led by Maestro Gianluca Martinenghi, will take place on Sunday.
