Festival Sete Sois Sete Luas Cabo Verde

Founded in 1993 as an Italy-Portugal cultural exchange directed by Marco Abbondanza and named for characters in Jose Saramago's novel Memorial do Convento, Festival Sete Sois Sete Luas welcomed Cabo Verde into its network in 1998. A 2009 Spanish Caja Granada prize funded a permanent SSSL Centrum in Ribeira Grande, Santo Antao, which now serves as the festival's Cape Verde headquarters with year-round showrooms, a restaurant, bookshop and concert and rehearsal spaces.

Festival Sete Sois Sete Luas began in 1993 as a cultural exchange between Italy and Portugal, conceived and directed from its founding by Marco Abbondanza, and took both its name and its guiding philosophy from Jose Saramago's novel Memorial do Convento, whose characters Baltasar Sete-Sois and Blimunda Sete-Luas build a flying machine called the passarola, an image the festival has adopted as its own symbol for the evocative, boundary-crossing power of art.