Italy’s opera houses hope to save Verdi’s historic home – by singing together

9 February 2023, 11:41 | Up-to-date: 9 February 2023, 12:21

Opera properties are becoming a member of arms to provide beloved composer Giuseppe Verdi’s property into community ownership.

The famed dwelling of Giuseppe Verdi, Villa Verdi, is up for public auction this year and could be taken away from the public.

Sant’agata Villanova Sull’arda, a wonderful farmhouse in the Italian province of Piacenza, was the composer’s household for about 50 many years.

Songs has rung as a result of its partitions, with the good operas La Traviata and Il Trovatore, as perfectly as the composer’s Requiem, composed under its roof.

The precious estate is shared amongst four distinct heirs, who for above 20 decades have quarrelled more than what to do with the property. All four want to offer, but none can manage to acquire the other out.

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Previous 12 months the Italian Supreme Court docket instructed the siblings to set the household up for sale. The auction price tag is envisioned to start off at €30 million, but the Italian condition has the appropriate to make its have offer you before proceedings begin. With the govt only allocated €20 million for the obtain, there are problems it may possibly be acquired and turned into a personal home.

So, to assist maintain its position as a national heritage and tourism internet site, main opera properties throughout Italy are putting alongside one another a series of Verdi concert events to elevate resources.

The composer’s most famous operas will be done throughout the place in the direct-up to the auction in June, with proceeds going to the Italian state (details of the Viva Verdi programme can be discovered on the culture ministry web-site).

Born in the 19th century, Giuseppe Verdi was a popular determine in Italy’s Risorgimento motion, and currently is viewed as the best Italian opera composer of the 1800s.

His household ‘Villa Verdi’ has turn into a vacationer attraction, and until the outbreak of Covid-19, it was a preferred museum. The declining income considering the fact that the pandemic has compelled the heirs to make a determination on the property’s ownership.

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Italy’s society minister, Gennaro Sangiuliano, stated it was “the responsibility of the Republic” to honour the memory of Verdi.

“It is not only a actual physical position, but also a place of the collective memory of all Italians,” he extra.

Verdi had the dwelling built in 1848 on land he now owned. 3 a long time later, he moved in with his second wife, soprano Giuseppina Strepponi.

He lived there right up until he died in 1901, when it was handed to his cousin Maria Filomena Verdi, whose immediate descendants are the 4 Carrara Verdi siblings who individual the home these days.