2023 Caracalla Festival

Opera, dance, cinema, theatre, great symphonic music, jazz, and pop at the Caracalla Festival. The rich summer program of the Rome Opera Theatre stages 50 evenings from 30 May to 10 August at the Baths of Caracalla.

The offer is expanding, and the spaces also increase: the Teatro del Portico is added to the usual 4,500-seat arena, the Teatro Grande, close to the ancient Baths, in the area of ​​the Temple of Jupiter, an ideal place to welcome new and different genres.

The Festival hosts many great artists such as Myung-Whun Chung, Damiano Michieletto, Lorenzo Mariani, Roberto Bolle and Jacopo Tissi, Moni Ovadia, Stefano Di Battista, Giovanni, and Matteo Cutello,  for jazz; Antonello Venditti and Francesco De Gregori, Fiorella Mannoia with Danilo Rea, Andrea Bocelli and, for the first time in Caracalla, Zucchero, Negramaro and Massimo Ranieri.

On Friday, 23 June, at 9.30 pm, the Caracalla Festival presents the world premiere screening of the restored version of The Great Dictator by Charlie Chaplin, with music performed by the Theater Orchestra, the last chapter of a project born in 1999, which stages all of Chaplin's films with a live soundtrack. The Cineteca Nazionale di Bologna restored the famous masterpiece, Timothy Brock, director of the musical, for the occasion on the podium of the Rome Opera Orchestra, the original score with the music composed by Charlie Chaplin and Meredith Willson, including that for the famous dance scene with the globe by Adenoid Hynkel on music from Wagner's Lohengrin accompanying the episode of the Jewish barber on Brahms' Hungarian Dances.

OPERA

The Caracalla Festival 2023 is entirely dedicated to the two masterpieces of the famous "popular trilogy" by Giuseppe Verdi: La Traviata and Rigoletto.

The Parisian story, taken from La dame aux camélias by Dumas Fils, signed in 2018 by Lorenzo Mariani, sets the opera in the Sixties of Dolce Vita, a clear homage to Federico Fellini's Rome. On the podium, Maestro Paolo Arrivabeni. On stage, Francesca Dotto, already several times an interpreter of Violetta at the Rome Opera; Christopher Maltman and Marco Caria as Giorgio Germont; Giovanni Sala and Alessandro Scotto di Luzio as Alfredo Germont.

From Dolce Vita to the underworld, with Rigoletto in the staging by Damiano Michieletto, who sets it in an imaginary criminal world. On the podium Riccardo Frizza; the lead performers are Roberto Frontali, Nina Minasyan (Gilda), Piero Pretti (Duke of Mantua), Martina Belli, and Riccardo Zanellato, respectively, as Maddalena and Sparafucile.

BALLET

A colossal stage system with dancers, musicians, and singers on the same stage is for Strictly Gershwin, a joyful and overwhelming musical starring étoiles, principal dancers, soloists, and the Ballet Company of the Rome Opera, directed by Eleonora Abbagnato. The show, by choreographer and director Derek Deane, is a tribute to George Gershwin and his music, which was able to tell the hopes and moods of an entire generation in the fantastic Thirties, with Ginger Rogers, Fred Astaire, and the glamor of the Golden Age. Between fragments of Rhapsody in Blue and others from An American in Paris, passing through the immortal Summertime, moments of classical and modern dance alternate with tap dance and the suggestive ballroom atmospheres. The costumes were designed and created by the Maison Biagiotti.

Great dance again with the traditional evenings of Roberto Bolle and Friends and with the Gran Gala starring the guest stars Maia Makhateli and Jacopo Tissi accompanied by the étoiles Alessandra Amato, Rebecca Bianchi, Susanna Salvi, Alessio Rezza, and the principal dancers Claudio Cocino and Michele Satriano, soloists and corps de ballet of the Rome Opera. On the podium, Maestro Alvise Casellati.

SYMPHONIC MUSIC

Symphony No. 9 by Beethoven is the great protagonist of the symphonic proposal of the Opera House. The masterpiece of the famous German composer is interpreted by the great Myung-Whun Chung for the first time in Caracalla with the Orchestra and Chorus of the Theater, directed by Ciro Visco, with the solo voices of Olga Bezsmertna, Sara Mingardo, Giovanni Sala and Roberto Tagliavini.

POP

The unmissable appointments with pop music start as early as 30 May, with Zucchero on stage also on 31 May, 2 and 3 June, Fiorella Mannoia and Danilo Rea on 1 June, Venditti-De Gregori on 5, 7, 8, and 15 June, Andrea Bocelli on 10 June, the Negramaro on 13, 14, and 16 June,  Massimo Ranieri on 24 July, always at 9 pm.

Tickets for The Great Dictator, Strictly Gershwin, Sinfonia n.9, Roberto Bolle and Friends, La Traviata, Gran Gala di Danza Rigoletto are on sale at the Teatro dell'Opera box office and on Ticketone.