Are all seasons Opera Season throughout Italy? Numerous times I have attempted to search and can’t find a clear answer to this question. Planning to be there fall of 2024. We welcome recommendations for opera companies and theaters, along with advice on how far in advance to secure tickets in. A tip I can offer, in Lucca, Puccini’s city, every night at the SanGiovani medieval chapel Puccini opera is performed by a pianist and 2 or 3 vocalists, lasting 1 hour. Excellent acoustics, magnificent voices, ethereal. It has been our experience, 3 visits over the years during the fall, no need to purchase tickets more than an hour or so in advance, at the entrance to the chapel. About 18euro, 16euro if you purchase tickets for 2 nights in a row. It’s the longest running concert in the Western world. Grazie
Posted by
San Francisco Bay Area (USA)
15236 posts
There is an opera company in virtually every city in Italy, certainly in many provincial capitals.
Aside from the website of each individual opera house, this is the best comprehensive database I can find.
https://www.operabase.com/seasons/2024/italy/en
Posted by
Phoenix🌵
2771 posts
I found this opera website yesterday. I haven’t used it since my trip isn’t until Sept 2024. https://operaticketsitaly.com/opera-concerts-schedule-lucca/?p=34&l=2&dte=2024-09-01
Posted by
Firenze, Italy
1534 posts
Well, please make a distinction between 2 or 3 persons performing with piano, and operas with a 45 to 65 piece orchestra, a 40 to 70 choir and full staging; we are talking about very different things and experiences. Also there is definitely a difference between listening to highlights and following a complete opera from beginning to end; there is about the same difference between street food or a full restaurant experience. Opera was never meant to be "intimate", it was meant, from the very beginning, to be the most magnificent of all kind of performances; the importance of a city or a reign could be surveyed by the scale of its opera house.
There are 13 main houses (Fondazioni lirico-sinfoniche): Teatro regio (Turin), La scala (Milan), Arena (Verona), La Fenice (Venice), Teatro Verdi (Firenze), Comunale (Bologna), Maggio musicale (Florence), S. Cecilia and Opera (Rome), S. Carlo (Naples), Petruzzelli (Bari), Massimo (Palermo) and Cagliari; their seasons, money permitting, are usually all year long, all houses have their own orchestras and choir. Some of these houses are magnificent historical buildings like Scala, Fenice and S. Carlo (the older of all them). - After that, there are about 20 "teatri di tradizione", second tier houses whose seasons, while not less magnificent than main houses, are usually shorter; we are talking about houses like Brescia, Parma, Piacenza, Pisa, Catania.
As all these houses rely on somewhat unstable public funding, they cannot make programs too far in time; at this moment, seasons are announced about to the next summer, and it will take a long time to have the second half of the year. So, if you are interested in opera, you cannot plan an year from now. Unless there is some special performer and tickets sell as soon as the opera is announced, usually you can still find places with a couple months advance (more at La Scala and Arena).