When Paris held its first Nuit Blanche – a frenetic all-night, multi-venue cultural bash – in 2002, few could have imagined that five years later White Night fever would be sweeping Europe’s capitals, and spreading to other cities.

From Rome, which will hold its fifth White Night on 8 September, to Madrid (22 September), Toronto (29 September), Brussels (also 29 September), Paris and Valletta, Malta (6 October) and dozens of other cities, collective insomnia is in, at least for one night a year, Elisabetta Polovedo wrote in yesterday’s New York Times.

Between opera recitals, jazz jam sessions, contemporary-art shows, circus acts, theatrical declamations and post-modern installations, the offerings are endless.

In Europe, the initiative has been so successful that several cities have formed a consortium, White Nights Europe, to time their all-night parties on successive weekends. In a perfect, newly unified European world, partygoers would migrate from one capital to the other, dancing the night away.

It seems that Malta does not form part of this alliance.

Technically, Ms Polovedo writes, a White Nights Europe Charter binds these capitals (Paris, Rome, Riga, Brussels, Madrid and, starting this year, Bucharest) to respect certain tenets, including that events will be free and organised throughout a city, not just in its centre. But a lot depends on cash flow and local ambitions.

The European White Nights cities are also supposed to share a common artistic project, which this year is the creation of a “lounge” area in the heart of each city. In Rome, organisers will recreate an Italian garden in the Piazza Capranica, near the Pantheon, that will adhere to a Renaissance model.

The lounge is meant to be an oasis of calm amid the turmoil that is sure to sweep Rome’s centre: past editions of the White Night have brought as many as two million people into the streets, according to organisers. “It will be a decompression area where people can relax,” said Ms Marinelli of the outdoor Roman lounge.

Rome (www.lanottebianca.it) is trying to capitalise on the all-night party’s potential tourism draw by planning a full programme of events for the weekend. These include a concert by the Italian pop icon Lucio Dalla at Villa Borghese and a reading from “The Aeneid” – in Italian – on the Piazza del Campidoglio (City Hall) on Friday 7 September in the evening, as a sort of curtain raiser.