Titled Don Giovanni and the man of stone, the Festival refers not only to the famous opera by Mozart, but to one of the central myths of western culture, the myth of Don Giovanni: within the conflict between human finiteness and its aspiration to eternity, between the body and the spirit, reverberates the relationship between the immortality of the work of art and the inexorable breath of time, between the written and the oral, between tradition and modernity. These themes weave through the 54th International Festival of Contemporary Music and find their synthesis in the opening event, the opera-installation Don Giovanni a Venezia.