The 2021 Opera Festival to open in Verona Arena

FLORENCE, ITAlY – The 2021 Opera Festival will open at the Verona Arena on June 19, 2021, with a concert version of Aida conducted by Riccardo Muti. The season will feature the operas, dates and stellar casts originally scheduled.

The Verona Arena received recently the green light from the Italian authorities after COVID restrictions were eased to host 6,000 seats, a capacity that puts the Veronese amphitheatre top in Europe.

In total compliance with the safety measures, like a true artistic collective, Fondazione Arena di Verona will produce five new productions that are light and less architectural but more technological than traditional ones, and feature the use of spectacular innovative video projections, ideal for “clothing” the Arena’s impressive setting.

The health problem therefore becomes an opportunity for interpretative renewal, and bears witness with hard facts to the work by the Arena’s various departments, who will show their skills by realizing every new production with great teamwork.

The Verona Arena Foundation also started a collaboration with some of the top museums and exhibition spaces in the country including the Apostolic Library in the Vatican, the Uffizi Gallery, the Egyptian Museum and Cinema Museum in Turin, Rimini’s Fellini Museum, Pompeii’s Archeological Park, the Valley of the Temples Park in Agrigento, the Archeological Park at Paestum, the Museum of Chinese Art and Ethnography in Parma, and Florence’s Alinari Photography Foundation. The project intend to present to the world the Italian beauties and received the patronage of the culture ministry.

After Muti exhibition, the Opera Festival schedule continues with Cavalleria Rusticana-Pagliacci, Nabucco, La Traviata, Turandot and Aida.

The Mayor of Verona and President of Fondazione Arena di Verona, Federico Sboarina, states: “We are very proud to present the 2021 season of the Opera Festival. During this long, complicated winter, we never stopped working, in spite of the economic and organizational uncertainties. After exactly a year from the first lockdown, the situation is still very serious. There is a lack of certainty regarding the future and what we shall experience in the coming weeks and months. However, like last year, even if with even greater difficulties due to a year of crisis, Fondazione Arena is ready to start again”.