The Diplomat
The director of the Instituto Cervantes, Luis García Montero, and the president of the Società Dante Alighieri, Andrea Riccardi, signed this Wednesday the first collaboration agreement between both institutions.
The signing, which took place in the Palazzo Firenze in Rome, the historic headquarters of the Dante, is the first act of García Montero’s work trip to the Italian capital, which, among other activities and meetings, includes a private audience with Pope Francis in the Vatican Library on Thursday.
The agreement with the Dante —a “sister” entity that is responsible for the dissemination of Italian culture and language in the world— seeks to define an institutional framework to “support their respective cultural policy objectives and jointly develop activities and projects” especially in the academic and certification fields, according to the Cervantes in a press release.
At this first official meeting, Luis García Montero was accompanied by the Spanish ambassador to Italy, Miguel Fernández-Palacios, and the directors of the Cervantes Institutes in the country (Rome, Milan, Naples and Palermo). The Società Dante Alighieri was represented by its president, Andrea Riccardi; its secretary general, Alessandro Massi; and its director general, Andrea Lemma.
At the meeting, each of the parties made a presentation of its organization and external network, as well as an introduction to its strategic plan, and addressed the geographical areas in which institutional collaboration can have the greatest impact. In this regard, both delegations underlined the nature of Spanish and Italian as complementary languages of culture and agreed to claim the teaching and learning of languages as part of the response to the challenges of globalization.
