Yesterday, Pope Francis received in audience the director of the Instituto Cervantes, Luis García Montero, before whom he highlighted the importance of “defending Spanish”.
García Montero was received in a private audience by Jorge Mario Bergoglio in the Vatican Library, within the framework of his working trip to Rome which included, the day before, the signing of the first collaboration agreement between the Instituto Cervantes and its Italian counterpart, the Società Dante Alighieri.
During the meeting, according to a press release from Cervantes, Bergoglio, who was born in Buenos Aires, stressed the importance of' defending Spanish and added, jokingly, that the institution should 'teach people to speak better than we Argentines do'. During the half-hour audience, the Pope confessed to García Montero that when he was a Literature teacher at a school in Santa Fe (Argentina), the poems of Federico García Lorca helped him to get his students interested in the subject. In particular, La casada infiel,” a romance with a 'spicy tone,' the pontiff said with amusement.
