A special evening at the National Theatre in Nairobi to celebrate the Italian language and literature, an event that will feature readings, stories and suggestions about Italian and its importance in the world.
A journey starting from literature and poems, whose supreme exponent was Dante Alighieri, passing from children's books (Collodi and Rodari also translated into Swahili), to contemporary novels, with Alessandro Baricco and Elena Ferrante, and ending with opera and the poet in music Fabrizio De Andrè. All words also translated and declaimed in English or Kiswahili.
This is ‘Found in translation, the treasure of the Italian language’, the show conceived and conducted by Freddie del Curatolo and produced by the Italian Institute of Culture in Nairobi as part of the Italian Language Week celebrations around the world, organised by the Italian Embassy in Kenya, at the initiative of our Foreign Ministry and under the high patronage of the Presidency of the Italian Republic.
Joining the journalist, writer and performer on stage this evening at the Kenya National Theatre's Ukumbi Ndogo auditorium will be one of Kenya's best-known and talented theatre actresses, Wakio Mzenge.
Wakio has not only been a landmark of her country's theatre movement for years, but a popular television face, for the series she stars in on Showmax and the Dstv platform channels. In 2022, Wakio was selected by the Italian NGO CISP, among 20 artists from Africa and Europe, to participate in the ArtXchange residency in Rome, where she took part in collective performances and projects. The Kenyan actress was also appointed ambassador of the Kenya International Theatre Festival (KITFest) in 2023 and 2024. On the evening, presented by an equally well-known Kenyan voice, that of the radio entertainer of every morning on Capital FM, Maqbull Mohamed, there will be space for music with a special guest from Italy, jazz vibraphonist Olmò Chittò, who brings an instrument that is very rare to see and hear in East Africa. Chittò, a thirty-seven-year-old composer and performer from Brescia with experience around the world, will be accompanied by Kenyan cellist Masala Sefu, who has always linked her musical experience to events in Italy, having graduated from the Folcioni Conservatory in Crema. But she is also the most celebrated Kenyan cellist and is simultaneously a member of the Enkare String Quartet, the Nairobi Orchestra, the Kenya National Youth Orchestra and the Kenya Conservatoire Symphony Orchestra. Events like the one tonight in Nairobi are a reminder that relations between Italy and Kenya are not only based on commercial, political, strategic and international cooperation assumptions, but are also and above all human relations, which are nourished by the encounter of different cultures capable of attracting and fascinating each other with their peculiarities.

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