"Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life." Berthold Auerbach

Tired of the beaten tracks? Walk the beats and traks!

Music and Opera Tours in Italy

Tour the sites of Music, Opera, Theatres, Instruments, History of Music, Composers, Museums

and attend Music Festivals and Events

VENICE itinerary

Fenice Opera House,

Vivaldi, Goldoni

see details below

PUCCINI itinerary

Torre del Lago,

Lucca

see details below

Other tours available upon request:

Gioachino Rossini (Pesaro)

Giuseppe Verdi (Parma-Cremona)

Tosca: tour the sites of the opera (Rome)

San Carlo Theatre, Liutai Napoletani, Museo del Conservatorio (Nalpes)

Cuticchio and the Opera dei Pupi (Palermo)

Fenice Opera House, Vivaldi Museum, Goldoni Birth House Museum, Concerts in Costume and Shows

Fenice Opera House

In 1774, the San Benedetto Theater, which had been Venice's leading opera house for more than forty years, was burned to the ground. The theater company decided to build a new opera house of its own on the Campo San Fantin. The auditorium was inaugurated on May 16, 1792 with an opera by Giovanni Paisiello entitled "I Giochi di Agrigento". It was named " La Fenice" (The Phoenix), in an allusion to its survival to the fire.

Antonio Vivaldi Museum

Antonio Vivaldi , 1678-1741, Italian composer. He was the greatest master of Italian baroque, particularly of violin music and the concerto grosso. Vivaldi received his early training from his father, a violinist at St. Mark's, Venice, and later studied with Giovanni Legrenzi. Ordained a priest in 1703, Vivaldi spent most of his life after 1709 in Venice, teaching and playing the violin and writing music for the Pietà, one of Venice's four music conservatories for orphaned girls.

Birth house of Carlo Goldoni

Carlo Goldoni, renowned author of such 18th-century plays as The Persian Wife and The Obstinate Women, was born and raised in this humble abode. Now part of a network of historical museums, the 15th-century structure stands as a testament to the craftsmanship of the era - a true-blue model of Venetian Gothic. Inside, exhibits and displays tell the tale of Goldoni's life and times, and celebrate the epic themes with which he toyed.

Concerts and Shows

The visit to the above sites can be combined with a concert of camera music, or a show in costume on the history of Venice that you can attend in the evening after the tour. The events are set in the charming atmosphere of the most beautiful palaces of Venice. You can choose among a selection of events that we will present you depending on your preferences and on the dates of your visit.

The area of Lucca and the Puccini Opera Festival

Torre del Lago   

Puccini house on the Massaciuccoli Lake

When Giacomo Puccini discovered Torre del Lago, he was so bewitched by its charm that he described it with these words: “.. supreme joy… paradise… Eden… 120 inhabitants, 12 houses. A quiet village, with luxuriant, extraordinary sunsets..” After a century, Torre del Lago is still an earthly paradise: sunny beaches, fresh pinewoods, quiet lakeshores.

Torre del Lago lies between the Lake of Massaciuccoli and the Tyrrhenian Sea, 4 kilometres from the magnificent beaches of Viareggio on the Tuscan Riviera, 18 kilometres from Lucca and Pisa.

This is where Puccini wrote most of his operas, and where, in his twilight years, he sought refuge between the rigorous demands of the worldwide tours which fame and success had thrust upon him. Here too is the open-air theatre where, since 1955, there has been an annual festival to celebrate the local boy who brought to a culmination the most Italian of the arts, lyric theatre.

With a view over the Massaciuccoli Lake almost annually since 1930, the festival attracts crowds of up to 40,000 to see Puccini’s best loved works, usually including a selection from Madame Butterfly, Tosca, Turandot and La Bohème.

The open-air theatre, just a few steps from the Villa Mausoleum where Puccini lived and worked. His mortal remains are now in a small chapel inside the Villa.

Puccini lived and worked in a villa, now the Villa Museum Puccini, a few hundred metres from the amphitheatre and his bones are interred in a chapel on the grounds so this view was the backdrop for the conception of many of his works. The town of his birth, Lucca, is nearby as are Pisa and the Italian Riviera.

Lucca   

Puccini Birth House Museum

Today in the house of Giacomo Puccini’s birth are kept objects which belonged to him: family furniture, an overcoat, valuable decorations that bear witness to the author’s extraordinary successes throughout the world.

Also on show are: autographs of important youthful compositions, the Messa a 4 voci (1880) and the Capriccio sinfonico (1883), a rich collection of letters written and received by the composer between 1889 and 1915. His last opera Turandot is evoked by the presence of the Steinway piano on which the opera was composed in his villa at Viareggio (a photograph shows Puccini seated before this instrument with his son Antonio) and by the splendid theatrical costume for Act II, donated to the Fondazione Puccini by the famous singer Maria Jeritza.

Lastly one can admire some fine pictures, such as the valuable portraits of Giacomo Puccini senior and his wife Angela Piccinini carried out by the important Luccan painter Giovanni Domenico Lombardi, on the occasion of their wedding.