Festival dei Due Mondi

The Festival dei Due Mondi (Festival of the Two Worlds), also known as the Festival of Spoleto, is an annual music and opera festival held every summer in Spoleto, an ancient city in the Italian province of Perugia. It was founded in 1958 by Gian Carlo Menotti, an Italian-American composer and librettist, who wanted to bring opera to a popular audience and help launch the careers of talented artists.

Menotti chose the small town of Spoleto as a location for his opera festival because of several reasons. First, being a small town, real estates, goods and services were relatively inexpensive here at the time. Second, Spoleto has two indoor theaters, a Roman theater and many other performance spaces. Third, it is located fairly close to Rome which makes it easily accessible by train and other transport.

Menotti chose the name “The Festival of the Two Worlds” because his intention was to have the worlds of European and American culture face each other. He later developed and strengthened this concept by inaugurating a twin festival, the Spoleto Festival USA. The first Spoleto Festival USA was held in 1977 in Charleston, South Carolina. However, in the early 1990s the American festival became an independent event because of growing disputes between its board and the Menotti family. It is still held every year but has nothing to do with the Festival dei Due Mondi.

Another sister festival was launched in 1986 in Melbourne, Australia. However, the Spoleto Festival Melbourne became an independent event and changed its name to the Melbourne International Festival of Arts in 1990. Today it is a major international arts festival simply referred to as Melbourne Festival.

The Festival dei Due Mondi is one of the most important and prestigious cultural events in Italy. Originally focused on music and opera, it now encompasses other art forms such as drama, dance and visual arts. For three weeks every summer, Spoleto is visited by nearly 500,000 people from all over Italy and abroad.

Over the years, the Festival of the Two Worlds in Spoleto has welcomed prominent artists from around the world: film directors Roman Polanski, Luchino Visconti, Ken Russel and Eduardo De Filippo, dancers and choreographers Rudolf Nureyev, Joaquin Cortes and Carla Fracci, conductor Thomas Schippers, actors Romolo Valli, Arnoldo Foà and Vittorio Grassman, composer Nino Rota, poet and critic Ezra Pound, musician and composer Ralph Farris, operatic tenor Luciano Pavarotti, and many others.