The grandeur of Verona’s open-air opera

The annual opera festival at the Arena di Verona – an ancient Roman amphitheatre built around 30 AD to seat 30,000 spectators – is a sight to behold. The world’s largest open-air opera venue, it gives unprecedented scope for leaning into the qualities that make people adore opera: sheer transporting spectacle.

I attended two of the 2026 festival’s offerings, Aida and La Traviata, appropriately among the largest-scale works in the operatic canon. The spectacle begins even before you reach your seat. In the streets around the Arena, the sets wait their turn in the open air, surreally juxtaposing imperial China (Turandot) with wintry Paris (La Bohème), a sphinx the size of a delivery van (Aida) and a larger-than-life grey elephant (La Traviata) – all propped among the parked cars and gelato stands of Piazza Bra.

When the audience crosses the red carpet to take their seats, they have to carefully climb uneven stone steps laid by the Romans more than two millennia ago. When Aida and Radamès wistfully declare their love for one another before a mighty golden pyramid, I could not help but think of the gladiators who fought to the death on that same spot two thousand years before.

To sing here – unamplified, of course – and fill an open-air arena of this size is a monumental feat of stamina. The whole company acquitted themselves well against such odds. It was the baritones who made the strongest impressions: the two fathers, Aida’s Amonasro and La Traviata’s Germont, played respectively by Youngjun Park and Luca Salsi, drew on a dark, brooding sense of power, magnified by the vast space.

Aida was the inaugural performance at the festival in 1913, chosen to commemorate the centenary of Verdi’s birth. The production I saw was the ‘golden’ version Franco Zeffirelli debuted in 2002, in which a colossal, gleaming pyramid takes centre stage, surrounded by the 14 sphinxes I had seen loitering in the streets the night before. There are idols, armies of dancers and priests, while Anna Anni’s costumes command the spotlight in a panoply of iridescent colour. Zeffirelli understood that, in a space this size, less is not more. The audience members in the ‘cheap seats’ at the very top of the amphitheatre need to be pulled into the drama as much as those in the stalls.

On the night I attended, the soprano Maria José Siri sang her 200th performance as Aida. She brought a warm and finely shaded lyricism to the role, while Yusif Eyvazov was an ardent Radamès. But the surprise of the night was the Italian mezzo Irene Savignano, whose Amneris – the pharaoh’s jealous daughter – grew in stature scene by scene until she was among the most magnetic figures on the stage.

La Traviata the following night had a lighter energy, despite the tragic subject matter. The reason for this was, partly, a rare collaboration between the Arena di Verona and the real Parisian cabaret, the Moulin Rouge. Dumas fils’s La Dame aux Camélias inspired the opera, which in turn partly inspired the Baz Luhrmann film, which has now been fed back into the opera. Verdi’s tragedy of a doomed courtesan was transplanted into Belle Époque cabaret, complete with a multi-storey red windmill and that monumental elephant I had seen the night before. The Scottish director, Paul Curran, had in fact worked on Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge! back in 2001, and while it may not have been the most original or innovative concept, it was rather entertaining. I confess I half-expected Violetta to descend on a trapeze.

While this – alas – did not happen, there was no shortage of decadent visual stimuli: vigorous simulated sex acts conducted with comic ferocity in the hollow back of the elephant; a chorus of male sailors in frilly knickers; not to mention a champagne fairy who wafted across the stage borne aloft in an ice bucket of Dom Pérignon. Beneath the cabaret, the singing was serious. Rosa Feola was a Violetta of seductive lyricism; René Barbera brought an elegant, old-fashioned bel-canto grace to Alfredo; and Luca Salsi, born a stone’s throw from Verdi’s Busseto, gave Germont gravitas and authority.

This summer, the festival ran two rival Aidas in a single season – Zeffirelli’s gold against Stefano Poda’s stripped-back, ‘crystal’ staging – alongside Nabucco, La Bohème and Turandot, and various gala nights. Booking has already opened for the 2027 festival, which includes Carmen and a much-anticipated Romeo and Juliet, marking the return of the full-length ballet to the Arena after more than three decades.

The Arena di Verona Festival has played a starring role in modern operatic history. Maria Callas sang here in the 1940s and 1950s, and the festival is partly credited with launching her international career. The Three Tenors sang here (separately) in the 1970s, and many other greats have graced the stage over the decades, alongside emerging talent. This year marked the festival’s longest season to date, demonstrating that appetite is undimmed.

If the stage was good enough for Callas and Pavarotti, then the Ryanair-esque legroom is a minor indignity well worth enduring. Garsington or Bayreuth may offer better acoustic intimacy and more formality, but the Arena offers something else entirely: this is opera as pilgrimage, as communal experience.