Verona, 100 years of opera season in the Arena. Original posters from the Salce Collection on display.

To celebrate the 100th Opera Season at the Arena di Verona, the National Archaeological Museum in Verona is hosting from June 10 to September 10, 2023 the exhibition Arena di carta. 100 Years of the Opera Season in the Arena of Verona in Posters from the Salce Collection, curated by Elisabetta Pasqualin and Giovanna Falezza, born of the collaboration between the Veneto Regional Museums Directorate and the Department of Culture of the City of Verona with the Civic Museums.

Original posters from the Arena Opera Festival are on display here on loan from the Museo Nazionale Collezione Salce in Treviso. The Nando Salce collection, preserved in the Treviso museum building, has more than 25,000 posters of advertising graphics collected over the course of the collector’s lifetime, from 1895 until 1962, when it was donated to the Italian state so that it could become a tool of study and knowledge for all.

The exhibition intends to allow people to relive the atmosphere that accompanied the opera event in the Arena amphitheater, which over the years, became the most famous open-air opera house in the world, thanks in part to its extraordinary acoustics. The illustrations of the posters, different every year until the 1940s, in fact reflect the artistic climate of the time, with suggestions of Art Nouveau at first, Expressionist and Futurist later, and even more specific forms peculiar to the advertising world.

The exhibition thus also accompanies the discovery of the history of advertising graphics, an artistic form that precisely in those years achieved success and typically found a primary source of inspiration in the publicity of great shows, such as those at the Arena. Also worth knowing are the illustrators and poster designers who authored the posters, including many from Verona (Pino Casarini, Ernesto Amos Tomba, Plinio Codognato, Albino Siviero known as Verossi, Tolmino Ruzzenente).

At the same time, the exhibition is also attracted and promoted by the Civic Museums of Verona, both at the Archaeological Museum at the Roman Theater, where an exhibition section is dedicated to the amphitheater, where a period model is housed to testify to the role played by the Arena in great eighteenth-century performances that constitute the precedents of the Arenian festival, and at the Museo Lapidario Maffeiano, where there are some inscriptions related to the monument.

Admission to the exhibition is included in the ticket to the National Archaeological Museum of Verona.

Hours: Friday, Saturday and Sunday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.

Pictured is a detail of the playbill of Aida staged at the Arena in 1913 for the centenary of Giuseppe Verdi’s birth.

Verona, 100 years of opera season in the Arena. Original posters from the Salce Collection on display.

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