Next year will be the Central European Year and this will be supplemented by the Hungarian-Italian Cultural Season, said Ministry of Foreign Affairs deputy state secretary Gergely Prőhle at the opening of the tent. He added that Italy was one of the most important founding members of the Central European Initiative, a forum for regional cooperation established in Budapest in 1989.
 
The Hungarian ? Italian tent is an initiative of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and is jointly operated by the Ministry of Public Administration and Justice and Budapest?s Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design.
 
Visitors to the festival can meet Hungarian and Italian celebrities in the tent, a nod to the slogan for the Hungarian-Italian Cultural Season: ?Találkozások/Incontri?, or ?meetings? in English.
 
Italian Ambassador to Hungary Maria Assunta Accili said she had never in her diplomatic career worked in a country where so many people wanted to speak Italian as in Hungary. She spoke highly of the Sziget Festival, where youth from other countries can get to know each other in spite of language barriers.
 
Source: Hungarian News Agency (MTI)