100th Arena Opera Festival: Palazzo Maffei new partner. Major fundraising project kicks off

The Palazzo Maffei House Museum is the new cultural partner of the Fondazione Arena di Verona: the Carlon Foundation, sensitive to the theme of artistic patronage, has launched a shared fundraising project in view of opera festival number 100.

In the heart of Verona, Palazzo Maffei opened its doors to the public in 2020, with an itinerary ranging from Greco-Roman antiquity to contemporary art, including masterpieces and art curiosities, totaling about six hundred works. The Carlon Foundation has decided to stand alongside Fondazione Arena, which will reach the important milestone of opera festival number 100 in 2023. This important collaboration stems from the common goals of the two institutions: the dissemination of culture, the promotion of art, and the preservation and transmission of artistic heritage to future generations.

“With due proportion,” commented Cavalier Luigi Carlon, “we have the same goals: to spread the culture of beauty, that of music and that of the visual arts. I am deeply convinced that loving culture, whatever it may be, leads to being better citizens and to loving our land more.”

Hence the project to commission a work of art related to the Arena and its Opera Festival and the choice by Gabriella Belli, to whom the museographic project of Palazzo Maffei Casa Museo is owed, of photographer Massimo Listri, who has succeeded in capturing in a truly unique photograph a powerful, hieratic, almost metaphysical Arena. Massimo Listri, a Florentine born in 1953, is one of the most significant Italian photographers. In a career spanning more than thirty-five years, he has exhibited his work all over the world and in major international museums and has published several volumes of his photographs that reveal the beauty of architecture, palaces, and historic settings.

“Listri took on a challenge that was not easy: for him, a master of interiors and a fundamentally intimate author, this is one of the first exterior photographs, and what’s more, it portrays a building of which there are thousands of shots, professional and otherwise,” said Gabriella Belli. “It was not obvious to create an image that would be emblematic and iconic of this place, yet the result is extraordinary. Massimo Listri’s photography communicates a state of suspension between reality and unreality and changes the perspective by making the audience the protagonist, though absent, with the vision from the stage to the audience: an empty audience, but one that will soon be packed.”

Palazzo Maffei Casa Museo, which owns Listri’s work created for the occasion that is on display in the museum itinerary starting Oct. 18, will donate thirty-three limited edition reproductions certified by Massimo Listri to thirty-three patrons in a major fundraising operation, the purpose of which will be to support the 100th Festival. This unprecedented initiative joins another project that will see its third edition in 2023: the 67 Columns for the Arena of Verona, an initiative born in 2021 thanks to the adhesion of 67 enlightened entrepreneurs who have ideally rebuilt the 67 columns of the Arena’s walls destroyed in the 1117 earthquake. So for the 2023 anniversary, the 67 Columns will be joined by 33 patrons who will purchase Massimo Listri’s artworks, for a total of one hundred supporters to support the Festival.

“I am truly grateful to the Carlon Foundation,” said Cecilia Gasdia, Superintendent and Artistic Director of the Fondazione Arena di Verona, “committed to the dissemination and preservation of culture as a shared good, just as we are committed to the dissemination and preservation of the Art of Italian Opera Singing, which the State has decided to nominate for inscription in the UNESCO Intangible Heritage of Humanity. The opera we are presenting today is the first fruit of a collaboration that we have been studying for some time with the Carlon family and includes Casa Museo Maffei as an illustrious example in the path of patronage that we are pursuing in view of our upcoming 100th Festival.”

Reservations to purchase one of the limited edition reproductions will kick off on Nov. 3. By purchasing the opera, donors will gain access to the Pre-opera Gala, the June 17 Premiere and two special seats for the same performance.

In addition to the generous act of patronage, the two institutions unveiled a number of joint promotional initiatives including the sale of Palazzo Maffei Casa Museo tickets, which for the first time will be able to be purchased online at the same time as Arena Festival tickets, further expanding the artistic offerings for the city’s opera-goers and tourists.

“Palazzo Maffei’s tribute to this important anniversary of the Arena di Verona seals the collaboration between two cultural institutions, one a hundred years old and one still very young, nevertheless linked to the city’s imagination and strongly motivated toward artistic promotion and the development of creativity. Palazzo Maffei Casa Museo believes in these projects of dialogue between the arts and in particular the relationship with the world of music,” emphasizes Vanessa Carlon, director of Palazzo Maffei Casa Museo.

Image: Massimo Listri, Arena 100° © Massimo Listri

100th Arena Opera Festival: Palazzo Maffei new partner. Major fundraising project kicks off

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