Mother Tongue Festival (Sconfiniamo)

A festival born in school and brought to the park

The Mother Tongue Festival, also known by its title Sconfiniamo (Let's Cross Borders), is a late February event held at Parco Giordano Sangalli, in the Torpignattara district of Rome's 5th Municipality (Metropolitan City of Rome Capital, Lazio). This is not a festival planned in an office; it is the public showcase of work that takes place throughout the school year within the district's comprehensive institutes. For one morning, the park stops being just a transit garden and becomes a collective classroom, filled with children, teachers, parents, volunteers, and adult learners.

International Mother Language Day

The event is part of International Mother Language Day, proclaimed by UNESCO and celebrated every February 21st. The date commemorates the 1952 events in Dhaka, when students were killed while demanding recognition for the Bengali language. This is not a minor detail for Torpignattara: the neighborhood is home to one of the largest Bengali communities in Europe, and this memory is shared with children through simple words, songs, and poems. Around this anniversary, the festival expands its focus to all the languages spoken in the neighborhood's homes, from Arabic to Chinese, Romanian to Spanish, and Bengali to Italian dialects.

How the morning unfolds

The park is divided into about fifteen small thematic stations, each managed by a class, an association, or a group of parents. Children rotate from one booth to another with their teachers, following a map. Activities featured in past editions include:

• Linguistic autobiographies: each child reconstructs their family's language tree, including grandparents
• Intergenerational interviews between primary school pupils and adult students from CPIA 1 who are learning Italian as adults
• Bengali dances and songs, with Tagore's verses taught through movement
• Chinese language and culture workshop, featuring spring and New Year ideograms
• Kites and flying objects built with paper and words chosen by the children
• Intercultural calendar, listing the holidays of the students' countries of origin
• Narrative umbrellas, where children sit underneath to listen to stories

Who builds it

The festival is promoted by the Simonetta Salacone (Pisacane and Iqbal Masih campuses) and Laparelli (Mancini, Deledda, and Rei campuses) comprehensive institutes, together with a network of local organizations: CEMEA del Mezzogiorno APS, Asinitas, the A Sud association, the Ecomuseo Casilino, the He Ping-Pace association for Chinese language and culture, the CPIA 1 of Rome, the Mameli Library, and the Tarducci Bibliopoint, as well as the Pisacane 099 parents' association. Much of the project is supported by Galassia Torpigna, funded by the Con i Bambini social enterprise.

Why it's worth visiting

Those arriving at Parco Sangalli that morning won't find a stage or a concert program, but something rarer: a neighborhood telling its own story through its own languages, without rhetoric. It is a useful opportunity to see up close how coexistence really works in an established Roman suburb, and to see multilingualism treated not as a problem to be fixed, but as a skill to be valued. Participation is free, and the atmosphere is the informal, slightly chaotic one of a school party expanded to the whole district.