Italian culture is highly valued in Bangladesh. The reports are based on the Framework Cooperation Agreement signed in 1991, which is followed up by multi-annual executive protocols. In July 2023, the cultural program for the period 2023-2027 was signed. The Italian language is taught at the Institute of Modern languages of the University of Dhaka, which receives an annual financial contribution for this purpose. The teacher is Professor Stefania Chiapello. The Bengali language, the seventh most spoken language in the world, is currently not taught in Italy except within the Bangladeshi community. The defense of the use of the mother tongue against Urdu imposed by the Pakistani authorities of the time, helped to animate the struggle for independence of Bangladesh.
In memory of the massacre of the students of the University of Dhaka in 1952, an important monument “to the mother tongue” was erected in Dhaka, a copy of which was made in the gardens of Via Panama in Rome on the initiative of the Bangladeshi diaspora in Italy. The date of the massacre, February 21, has been declared by UNESCO as the “International Day of the Mother Language”. Italy finances an archaeological mission to the Mosque of Bagerhat, conducted by the Lerici Foundation. In 2011 the Italian artist Mimmo Paladino created a tribute to the great Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore, Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913. The painting is kept in the Embassy. In 2024, the Embassy joined the EUNIC cluster of European cultural institutes in Bangladesh. Bangladesh participated in the 2024 edition of the Venice Biennale with its own pavilion organized by the Shilpakala Academy, the country’s main cultural institution. With the growth and consolidation of the Bangladeshi community in Italy, diaspora artists who unite the two cultures begin to emerge, such as the director and actor Phaim Bhuiyan and the writers Jhumpa Lahiri and Neeman Sobhan.