Entitled, L'Arte e' Lingua - Art is Language, the project is being organised by the Ministry of Culture and in co-operation with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The promotion of Slovenian culture comes at the time of Italy's stint as EU president and shortly before Slovenia's accession to the EU.

Last Friday, a literary evening was held at Casa delle Letterature in Rome as part of the Roma Poesia Festival, where representatives of the younger generation of Slovenian literates Taja Kramberger, Matjaž Pikalo and Peter Semolič read their works. The same day, Project 4, an exhibition by Majda Gregorič, opened in the framework of the event dubbed Contemporary Trieste, a Dialogue with the Arts of Central and Eastern Europe 2003, held in the Studio Tommaseo gallery.

The Teatro Gobetti theatre in Torino will host a dance performance by Plesni teater Ljubljana this Thursday, while the Ljubljana-based Museum of Contemporary and Modern Art will mount a retrospective exhibition of Slovenian contemporary art at Genoa's Loggia dei Banchi between November 9 and 22. There will be also a smaller-scale show of six Slovenian architectural offices under the title 6pack.si.

A Slovenian film retrospective will be held in Rome in early November. After the opening show at the AGIS cinema on November 5, a debate will be held with the director of the film Ekspress Ekspress, Igor Šterk. Other films to be screened in the following days will be the animated feature-length film The Socialisation of a Bull, and the feature films Bread and Milk, Outsider, Sweet Dreams, as well as some older Slovenian films.

The municipality of Trieste and the Trieste-based National and University Library will organize a ceremony in November to honour the 90th anniversary of Boris Pahor, a Slovenian author living in Trieste. Gov't PR and Media Office