Every year, Mario Alvarez, together with AmarilloArt and the Centro Cervantes Itinerante, celebrates multilingualism on the occasion of the European Day of Languages and World Translation Day. But these two anniversaries, 26 and 30 September, are only two moments in a long series of initiatives that Mario Alvarez carries out through the project “Cervantes Itinerante – Literature Without Borders”.
Conceived by the artist himself, the project aims to transform Miguel de Cervantes’s masterpiece into a living linguistic bridge, through exhibitions, meetings, tertulias, performances and readings.
Following the initiatives held last year in Gorizia and Nova Gorica, the two cross-border cities jointly named European Capital of Culture 2025, this year Mario Alvarez’s project started out again from Rome, heading first to Turin and then to Trieste, with an travelling reading marathon.
In Trieste, on Saturday 10 October, Mario Alvarez will stage a performance in which he will bring to life an itinerant reading of Don Quixote, involving different readers who will take turns reading passages from the novel, each in their own mother tongue: a way of making the linguistic richness of humanity tangible through a single shared text.
The performance will take place at the Villaggio IN Italia, at the Molo dei Bersaglieri
The initiative will then continue online at www.cervantesitinerante.org and www.amarilloart.es.
The influence of Cervantes’s work on world culture has been, and remains, enormous. Cervantes transcends his own era, engaging readers of all periods and latitudes and overcoming every literary and geographical boundary. His Don Quixote, besides being considered the first modern novel, has been translated into around 140 languages, dialects or linguistic varieties. This is precisely why the artist Mario Alvarez, on a Quixotic ride across different countries, has for more than twenty years been carrying forward his project “Cervantes Itinerante,” which takes shape through exhibitions, video installations, performances, readings, dialogues, gastronomy and tertulias.
