The onset of puberty is difficult, and especially so for girls in art house films. Marta is 12 and has been away from Italy for 10 years. In the days after returning with her mother and sister, she contends with being prepared for her first communion and her changing body. Quietly, as if not there, Marta observes the hypocrisy of adults. Dog-tired from working in a bakery, her mother is forced into the background.

Even though their names are bound together in the portmanteau title, the directors of the four short films that make up RoGoPaG - Rossellini, Godard, Pasolini and Gregoretti - don't go for any sort of narrative tie-ins. The only thing that links the films are the Sixties themes: nuclear annihilation, the shifting role of women and the rise of consumer capitalism. The largely unsatisfying results would only recommend themselves to the dedicated arthouse fan or movie historian were it not for Pasolini's inspired contribution, La Ricotta.

If in space no one can hear you scream, that’s certainly not a problem you’ll experience in a giallo sound studio. Known for their high anxiety and buckets of blood, the Italian giallos of the Sixties and Seventies gave us heinous horror, drenched in style. Directors such as Lucio Fulci, Mario Bava and Dario Argento enjoyed a reign of terror with their handsome barbarism benefitting from fantastically histrionic sounds and scores.

Way up in the mountains of northern Italy sits a small spa town called Porretta Terme. For many visitors it is the resort’s healing waters that brings them here. Yet for others it is the healing music – once a year the Porretta Soul Music Festival is held across the second to last weekend in July. Here veterans of American soul music take the stage, often performing their only European show of the year (and, sometimes, many years).

The tone of these two new Pier Paolo Pasolini's re-releases couldn't be more different. The Hawks and the Sparrows stars the Italian prince of laughter Totò and one of Pasolini's most popular Calabrian peasant-actors (and lovers) Ninetto Davoli, and ambles gently through the Italian countryside in a surreal and inventive and Last of the Summer Wine-ish way. Pigsty, on the other hand, is the kind of Pasolini film where, when two boys meet, you have no idea if they're going to fight each other, fuck each other or eat each other.

The curtain rises onto a wall that totally blocks the view. A long silence... then, without warning, the wall collapses – to cheers of delight from the audience. For the rest of the evening, the dancers have to pick their way over rubble strewn across the middle ground that restricts free movement to strips of open space at the front and rear of the stage. 

It stymies any tourist to sum up for others what they saw abroad. Still more challenging, to create (or recreate) for theatre as a choreographer something more than superficial, more than clichéd about Italy, Japan, Los Angeles, Istanbul, these most clichéd of cultures. The opening of the monumental, enticing series of 10 of the late Pina Bausch’s “World Cities” season in London - a posthumous celebration of her talent - launched last night with the first of her views, Viktor, a production about Rome, postcards of Rome sent in Eighties Italy by a German choreographer.

Rossini's La Cenerentola is not an opera that I'd normally recommend to anyone with even half a brain. It takes the simple if mildly nauseating little tale of Cinderella, pads it out with parental abuse and drawn out cliffhangers, and ends in a pass-the-sick-bag denouement of "Goodness Triumphant". Yet, in an act worthy of the fairy godmother herself, Glyndebourne has transformed the piece into something unmissable. 

Francesco da Mosto’s two-parter is ostensibly about the Bard and his fascination with the TV historian’s native Italy. In reality, it’s a film about da Mosto and his apparently God-given, below-the-belt hotness. Given the camera’s ceaseless drooling at the presenter, a more honest title would have been “Ladies! Get a load of this!”

There has long been a conviction in Italian drama circles that there exists a “Special Relationship” between themselves and il Bardo di Stratford: something to do with the complexities of Elizabethan English syntax and the unusual amount of words of Italian that Shakespeare appropriated from the dominant European language(s) of theatre of his day.