On August 27th in Malfa the XIV edition of the Aeolians' Festival in the WorldFor ten days, until September 6th, the islands of Salina, Lipari, and Alicudi will once again engage in dialogue with those who left them. The event is organized by the Aeolian Museum of Emigration, the IRCE, and the municipalities of Santa Marina Salina, Malfa, Leni, and Lipari. The festival will visit several villages: Malfa, Lingua, Santa Marina Salina, Rinella, Lipari, and Alicudi. It opens with historians Marcello Saija and Michela D'Angelo, who will recount Aeolian emigration through documents. There's also space for literature, with the presentation of "La dama degli argonauti" by Lorenza Zambon. The most anticipated moment of the opening arrives on August 28th: the celebration of the centennial of the Panarellese Society of Brooklyn, founded by emigrants from Panarea in the early 1900s. The evening continues with a performance by the Panta Rei Band and a tribute to the late designer Barbara Vergnano. On August 29th, in Lingua, we'll be talking about Sicilian wines intertwined with stories of departures and returns.
On September 3 and 4, the festival looks to the other hemisphere. The focus is on Melbourne's Aeolian community, presented through initiatives curated by Cristina Neri. Thousands of islanders chose Australia as their new home, bringing with them their dialect, recipes, and devotions. Today, their descendants keep that bond alive, often without ever having seen the islands themselves. The grand finale is set for September 6 on Alicudi, the smallest and most isolated island in the archipelago. Here, the centennial of the Alicudi Society of Brooklyn is being celebrated, a fellowship formed to unite a community scattered across two continents. A century later, that thread remains unbroken.
The organizers describe the festival as a blend of "memory, books, and music." It's more than just a cultural program. It's a way to keep a door open between those who stayed and those who left, generation after generation. The Aeolian Islands have a history of emigration spanning over a century. Thousands of families left the islands because of hunger, poverty, or the search for a better future. They took with them only a few suitcases and the memory of a volcanic landscape that is hard to forget.
Today, that memory returns every summer, in the form of stories, songs, and faces recognizable even generations later. Some come from Brooklyn for the first time, searching for a great-grandparent's surname on a gravestone. Some, from Melbourne, discover online the dialect their grandparents never stopped speaking in the kitchen. For ten days, between fires lit by the sea and old photographs browsed together, Salina, Lipari, and Alicudi become, for all of them, simply home again.
