Rome is celebrating the French writer and novelist Marguerite Yourcenar on Thursday with a series of events marking her life and works 20 years after her death.
A photography exhibit and a display of Japanese ceramics, paying homage to Yourcenar's life-long fascination with Japan, will open in the Italian capital in the Casa delle Letterature.
The inauguration will be accompanied by a dance performance and a variety of readings from her work.
Yourcenar, who is probably best-known for her hugely popular Memoirs of Hadrian, died in December 1987 at the age of 84.
Italy has several events lined up throughout the year, including conferences and discussions.
The country's French Cultural Institutes also have a program of readings planned at different locations around the country.
Meanwhile, work is under way on a film adaptation of Memoirs of Hadrian, directed by British filmmaker John Boorman and possibly starring Spanish heartthrob Antonio Banderas.
Memoirs of Hadrian was published in 1951.
The book takes the form of a long letter by the Emperor Hadrian to his adoptive son and successor, Marcus Aurelius.
In the letter, Hadrian, close to his death, muses on his life, his ideas, his achievements and his personal life. The novel was an immediate success and met with great critical acclaim.
Yourcenar, who was elected as the first female member of the Académie Française in 1980, is considered one of the most respected writers in the French language.
She published a variety of novels, essays and poems during her life, as well as three volumes of memoirs.
The central figures in Yourcenar's fiction tend to be torn between society's demands and their own passions.
Interestingly, most of her protagonists are male, with the exception of Denier du Reve (A Coin In Nine Hands).
Her only novel with a contemporary setting, it was written while she lived in Italy, published in 1934 and then revised in 1959.
It tells of an assassination attempt on the Italian Fascist leader Benito Mussolini and explores the female psyche and life under a dictatorial regime from a variety of view points: that of a doctor, a flower-seller, a prostitute and a Resistance fighter.
Born in 1903 of Belgian and French parents, Yourcenar was educated to extremely high level thanks to her aristocratic father, publishing her first novel in 1929.
She spent much of her life in the US, together with Grace Frick, who translated her works and became her lifelong lover in 1937.
Yourcenar gained international fame for her historical novels, which drew psychologically astute portraits of people from the past while dealing with modern issues such as homosexuality.
