The Arena Opera Festival, since 1913

It is the city’s most famous event, a festival which has for decades drawn millions of tourists and opera lovers to Verona from all over the globe. The undisputed centrepiece of every Veronese summer is the Arena Opera Festival.

The event, which attracts the greatest talent from the world of opera to take to the famous stage, was founded in 1913 to mark the centenary of the birth of Giuseppe Verdi by Verona tenor Giovanni Zenatello.
To celebrate this landmark, Zenatello decided to put on a big opera show in the Arena, staging Verdi’s greatest work, Aida, which was even more spectacular in the grand surroundings of the 1st century amphitheatre.  

10 August 1913, the début of the world's greatest open-air opera festival 

People buzzing with excitement to watch opera. The audience contained Americans, Argentines, Russians, Germans and many famous people, such as Giacomo Puccini, Arrigo Boito, Pietro Mascagni and Franz Kafka. Held on 10 August, the performance of Aida was a huge success, thanks to the innovative stage setting, with three-dimensional elements rather than the traditional two-dimensional painted backdrops.

"The Great Triumph of Aida, in Verona’s Roman Amphitheatre, to the acclaim of the delirious and cosmopolitan crowd" (L’Arena newspaper, 12 August 1913)

Since 1936, the event has been organised by the Fondazione Arena di Verona and has only been stopped by the two world wars. In 2020, due to the Covid-19 epidemic, the festival was postponed to the following summer and replaced with a music festival entitled “In the heart of music” and featuring a series of one-off concerts and events staged in line with the measures imposed to prevent the spread of the disease.

WHERE TO BUY TICKETS
For information on purchasing tickets, please visit the official website of the Fondazione Arena di Verona.

Before and after the opera

Watching an opera in the Arena is a unique experience, every minute must be savoured, from the hours leading up to the performance to the aftermath. Treat yourself to an aperitif in one of the many bars and restaurants on the Liston in Piazza Bra, watching people coming and going in the run-up to the show. And when you leave the Arena at the end of the show, relax with dinner in one of the restaurants in the old town which stay open late so that spectators can continue their evening around the table, the sound of the wonderful arias still in their ears from another wonderful opera performance in Verona Arena.