Verona Arena becomes first in Europe with 6,000 seats

(ANSA) - VERONA, MAY 25 - The Verona Opera Festival 2021 has become an ambassador for Italian culture and beauty, thanks to a close collaboration by the Verona Arena Foundation with some of the top museums and exhibition spaces in the country, from the Uffizi to the Vatican Library, in the most significant development for this year's opera season in the iconic Veneto city.
    After placing opera for the first time at centre stage in 2020, the Arena is taking a further step this summer and thanks to a green light from the authorities after COVID restrictions were eased, it will have at its disposal some 6,000 seats, a capacity that puts the Veronese amphitheatre top in Europe.
    The 2021 Opera Festival will open on June 19 with a concert version of Aida conducted by Riccardo Muti.
    The schedule continues with Cavalleria Rusticana-Pagliacci, Nabucco, La Traviata, Turandot and Aida.
    2021 presents a season that revisits in a technological way the imposing spaces of the amphitheatre, in a new narration that ideally embraces Italian beauty, using the collaboration with national cultural champions 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 has secured the patronage of the culture ministry, for the first time in the Opera Festival's history, a recognition that caps unprecedented and joint progress by the Arena Foundation with the country's top cultural institutions.
    The initiative has been backed by the archeological, cultural and and natural heritage superintendency of the provinces of Verona, Rovigo and Vicenza.
    "The requirements imposed by the pandemic on the ways of putting on shows were seen as an important opportunity to be seized," said the superintendent of the Arena Foundation, Cecilia Gasdia.
    "Considering the 'traditional' Arena productions, imposing and predominantly architectural," she added, "we saw that gatherings would be inevitable. After carefully weighing the possible options and the production time available, we launched a completely different and certainly unexpected policy, highlighting our artisanal skills, talents and know-how, the competence that we have always nurtured, to thus carry out creative work that could belong to everyone, an experience that has precedents elsewhere, also in the theatre, but is unprecedented for Italy".
    The central ticket office will reopen its doors to new spectators on Wednesday May 26 at 10 am, and online sales will restart at the same time. (ANSA).