SINCE 1913
How opera came to the Arena, since 1913
The 1913 Aida that turned a Roman ruin into the world's largest open-air opera house — and the century of grand summer seasons that have followed since.
See Arena di Verona opera tickets on GetYourGuide ↗A centenary idea
The Arena's operatic life began with an anniversary. In 1913 Italy marked the centenary of Giuseppe Verdi's birth — the composer was born in 1813 near Busseto — and the Veronese tenor Giovanni Zenatello, with impresario Ottone Rovato, seized on the amphitheatre as a setting worthy of the occasion. Their choice of work was Verdi's Aida, the grandest spectacle in the repertoire. The first performance took place on 10 August 1913. Nobody knew whether opera would even work in an open-air Roman ruin of that size; the gamble was that the acoustics and the scale would carry it. They did.
The night that changed the Arena
That opening Aida was a sensation. Rather than the painted backdrops of a conventional theatre, the young Veronese architect Ettore Fagiuoli built three-dimensional sets that used the amphitheatre's own stone as part of the scenery — a radical idea at the time. The performance reportedly drew a remarkable audience, said to have included Giacomo Puccini and other leading musicians of the day. What the night proved was simple but decisive: the Arena's natural acoustics and vast floor suited grand opera as almost no purpose-built house could. The experiment was clearly worth repeating.
Why the Arena worked
Two things made the Arena an unlikely triumph. First, the acoustics: the elliptical bowl carries unamplified voices to the upper steps, so the core sound needs no microphones. Second, the sheer scale — an open floor far larger than any indoor stage let productions field enormous choruses, real processions and monumental sets. Grand nineteenth-century opera, Verdi above all, was written for spectacle, and here at last was a space that could deliver it at full size, under an open sky. The setting didn't shrink the music; it let it expand to fill an entire Roman arena.
More than a century of summers
From 1913 the festival became a fixture, returning nearly every summer since. The main interruptions came during the two World Wars, when the seasons paused. Otherwise the pattern has held for over a hundred years: each summer the Roman amphitheatre is transformed into what's often described as the world's largest open-air opera house, drawing audiences from across the globe to central Verona. Few cultural events anywhere can claim that kind of continuity in a single unchanged building — the stones are the same ones the first 1913 audience sat on, which is a rare thing to be able to say.
Built for spectacle
Over the decades the Arena became known for productions no indoor house could attempt. Directors such as Franco Zeffirelli staged Aida here with towering pyramids and sphinxes and processions of hundreds crossing the floor. But the festival's most-loved image isn't on the stage at all: by long tradition, as the sky darkens before curtain-up, the audience lights thousands of small candles around the stone tiers, turning the whole bowl into a ring of flickering light. It's a moment people remember longer than any single aria — a piece of ritual that belongs to Verona and nowhere else, and reason enough to be in your seat well before the music starts.
A living tradition, each summer
The festival is not a museum piece; it runs as a working season every year, typically from June to September. The specific operas, casts and staging change from one summer to the next, so the programme is always worth checking fresh on the live listing before you plan around it. What stays constant is the approach the 1913 pioneers established: grand-scale, open-air productions of the great classics, performed on natural acoustics in a two-thousand-year-old arena. More than a century on, that formula still fills the tiers night after summer night.
More things to do nearby
Still deciding which night to go?
Leave your email and roughly when you're in Verona — we'll send a short rundown of the summer opera season and how seating works.