The theatre festival that gives voice back to myth and poetry returns to Catanzaro for its 12th edition
Catanzaro, June 2025
From July 10th to August 26th, the highly anticipated event “GRAECALIS - The Wind of the Ancient Word” returns, the summer festival promoted by the GRAECALIS APS Association, which for twelve editions has brought classical theatre, poetry, and music to the stage as living tools for reflection, dialogue, and cultural citizenship.
Five evenings with free admission, hosted in the historic setting of the San Giovanni Monumental Complex in Catanzaro with the Patronage of the Municipality of Catanzaro and the active support of the Department of Culture and the Department of Tourism, for a project that stands out as one of the most consistent, refined, and rooted cultural experiences in the Calabrian theatre scene.
AN IDEA, AN INTELLECTUAL ENGINE
The festival is led by Professor Luigi La Rosa, teacher, writer, and scholar of the classical world. Creator of the festival and curator of the texts, La Rosa is the theoretical and creative engine of GRAECALIS: his work blends fidelity to ancient thought and contemporary cultural vision, restoring to classical texts their ethical value and poetic beauty with a living, accessible, and rigorous language.
His dramaturgies represent an original form of cultural dissemination, which allows even a non-specialist audience to engage with tragic thought, mythical word, and civic poetry of classicism, without ever giving up the complexity of the content or the literary quality.
GRAECALIS: AN ASSOCIATION, A LIVING CULTURAL PROJECT
The GRAECALIS APS Association, founded in 2023 by a close-knit team from the previous “Teatro di Calabria,” is much more than a theatre group: it is a structured and participatory cultural project, operating in the area with the conviction that classical culture is a contemporary necessity.
Through theatre production, training activities, collaborations with institutions, museums, and schools, GRAECALIS promotes an idea of art as a tool for freedom, awareness, and accessibility, capable of giving back to the public not only the beauty of ancient texts, but also their ethical and political strength.
“We believe that classical theatre is not a legacy to be preserved, but a language to be reactivated.
For us, classicism is not a repertoire, but a conscience. It is what still speaks to us, challenges us, asks us for responsibility.
Each of our works is a civic act, an artistic gesture and at the same time a cultural offering to the community.”
Luigi La Rosa, president and literary curator