Festival Sud Pontino (Italy). The Christmas Concert was a huge success.

The Church of San Leonardo Abate, in Tufo di Minturno, Italy, was packed for the Sud Pontino Festival – Winter Edition.

The Christmas Concert, held on the evening of December 26, 2025, at the Church of San Leonardo Abate, in the hamlet of Tufo di Minturno, concluded with a long and warm applause. It was part of the Sud Pontino Festival – Winter Edition | Meetings with International Folklore, directed by Francesco Mallozzi.
The event, organized by the Minturno Folkloric Association and supported by the Lazio Region, transformed the church into an evocative space for listening and sharing, offering the large audience an intense musical journey through traditional Christmas carols, suspended between the sacred and the profane.
The star of the evening was the Chorus et Cantus ensemble with the Voci Popolari Choir, led by the passionate and engaging direction of Silvia Nardelli, who combined musical rigor, expressive power, and a profound knowledge of oral culture. Her voice and energy gave life to a musical narrative capable of evoking ancient rites, popular devotion, and collective memory.
The performance was enhanced by soloists Alberto Di Micco on flutes and shawm and Arcangelo Di Micco on accordion, whose sounds enriched the concert with refined nuances of timbre, contributing to an atmosphere of great emotional intensity.
The audience's response was extraordinary: the church was packed and engaged, with constant attention and sincere appreciation for the artistic quality and cultural value of the offering. At the end of the concert, the parish priest Father Ashraf Eissa and Francesco Mallozzi expressed their great satisfaction, complimenting the high quality of the event and emphasizing the ability of music to strengthen the sense of community and sharing in the name of faith, tradition, and beauty.
The Tufo di Minturno Christmas Concert thus confirms its status as one of the most significant events of these holidays, demonstrating once again how promoting popular traditions and local communities through culture is a fundamental element of social growth and identity.