Three Puccini operas & Lucca
- For Friends of the Royal Academy.
- Puccini operas in the new open-air theatre near his home.
- Based in Lucca with visits to a selection of art and architecture and to places associated with Puccini.
Near the hamlet of Torre del Lago on the shores of Lake Massaciuccoli, only a couple of miles inland from the Tuscan coast, Giacomo Puccini built himself a villa. Here he wrote most of his operas, and in later life sought refuge between the rigorous demands of the worldwide tours which fame and success had thrust upon him. Here also is the open-air theatre where, since 1955, there has been an (almost) annual festival to celebrate the local boy who brought to a culmination the most Italian of the arts, lyric theatre. In 2008 the festival celebrated the 150th anniversary of Puccini’s birth in Lucca with the inauguration of a larger and more impressive theatre on the shores of Lake Massaciuccoli.
Other places associated with the composer are scattered through the hills and valleys of the hinterland including his birthplace in Lucca, where this tour is based, the village of his ancestors and childhood holidays, churches where he worked as an organist, bars he frequented. Within the remarkably complete and beautiful circuit of Renaissance ramparts, Lucca consists of a dense network of streets and squares with innumerable fine palaces and churches.
Read the itinerary
Comments from participants in 2009:
‘Turandot – really outstanding. Best production I’ve heard and seen.’
J. L., Hertfordshire
‘The hotel was excellent in every way.’
C. L., London
‘Lucca was a delight and the excursions served to give greater insight into the life of Puccini.’
J. M., Surrey