The Rome Opera recovers its summer season in the thousand-year-old Baths of Caracalla, after two years of pandemic, and will start on July 1 with the Mass of Leonard Bernstein directed by the Venezuelan Diego Matheuz.
The organizers of the program announced its start with this peculiar “theater piece for singers, actors and dancers” created in 1971 by the American composer in his attempt to combine classical and sacred music with rock, jazz or blues.
Matheuz will take the baton while the stage proposal will have the signature of the Italian Damiano Michieletto.
It will be the first time the Mass of Bernstein is represented in a scenic way in Italy but it will also mark the return of the long-awaited summer season to the imposing archaeological site of the baths that Emperor Caracalla built in the 3rd century AD
In the last two years, the shows had to be held in the nearby Circus Maximus, a huge esplanade that allowed a stage and a stall to be built large enough to allow the safety distance against contagion.
The Mass of Bernstein will have two other replicas, on July 3 and 5, and later other works will arrive, such as the Carmen by Bizet, directed by the Spaniard Jordi Bernàcer and the Argentine Valentina Carrasco, or the ballet Notre-Dame de Paris by Maurice Jarrre.
Already in August it will be time for classics like Il barbiere di Siviglia by Rossini.
Summer usually brings culture to the streets and squares of Rome, taking advantage of the afternoons, when the sun gives a respite.
For example, the guys from “Piccolo America” are once again organizing their Cinema in piazza (street cinema), screening classics and novelties in Piazza San Cosimato del Trastevere, in the peripheral area of Cervelletta and in Monte Ciocci Park.
In these open-air cinemas you can enjoy during the month of July the works of Alfred Hitchcock, Steven Spielberg, the Chilean Pablo Larraín, the Polish Pawel Pawlowski, the French Leos Carax, the American David Fincheramong many others.
The cinema will even reach the Imperial Forums and from July 1 to 10, in the incomparable setting of the Temple of Venus, classics such as the Cleopatra (1963) by Joseph Mankiewicz, the Satyricon (1969) by Federico Fellini or spartacus (1960) by Stanley Kubrick.
