Opera house stages a rebirth
Milan’s La Scala may have more seats, and La Fenice in la Venezia is more venerable by a century, but Palermo’s Teatro Massimo is easily the biggest opera house in Italy, a sprawling, 25,298-square-metre, neoromantic edifice that dominates the Sicilian capital’s antique skyline.
The Teatro Massimo is an opera house with a back story that few artistic venues can match. That in turn has contributed to bold experimentation in bringing high culture to a troubled community.
Superintendent Francesco Giambrone, who administers the Teatro, invites visitors to its terra-cotta and copper rooftop, some 76 metres above street level, for both the view and the parable it represents.
“Yes, yes, it dominates the city, it has the most amazing view,” Giambrone says. “Straight ahead, the sea, of course. To the right, the most beautiful old city of Palermo. To the left, the abusive new construction, ugly, the city of the Mafia.”
The Teatro’s history was troubled from the beginning. It was envisioned as 19th-century Palermo’s bid for European cultural credibility, when both Sicily and Italy were booming. But it took 33 years to plan and build, opening in 1897, closing after only two seasons and not reopening until 1901.
Teatro Massimo was closed again for renovations in 1974, when the Mafia’s power in Sicily was such that mob bosses appointed the Palermo mayor — and sometimes even appointed themselves to that position. The mayor of Palermo is also the president of the city-owned Teatro’s board.
Reformers blamed the corruption and Mafia domination for the city’s degradation, and nothing symbolized that more than Teatro Massimo, which remained closed for the next 23 years.
“It was a negative symbol of the city,” Giambrone said. “Then after those attacks, the city fought back, the city rebuilt itself, and it became a positive symbol.”
“Those attacks” were the1992 assassinations of antiMafia magistrate Giovanni Falcone, another judge who was his wife and their three bodyguards, on the highway to the Palermo airport, by a Mafia-planted car bomb. The murders caused an anti-Mafia backlash throughout Italy, perhaps nowhere more so than in Palermo itself, an uproar that broke the Mafia’s grip on the city.
Leoluca Orlando was the mayor then, and he remembers famed Italian conductor Claudio Abbado on the 1997 opening night of the first concert in the Teatro, by the renowned Berlin Philharmonic.
Since then, the Teatro has been staging a mix of classical and innovative productions, in ballet, opera and classical music.
Orlando is once again the mayor of Palermo, for the third time.
“Nowhere does the opera symbolize its city like the Teatro Massimo symbolizes Palermo,” he said. “Our opera house is not only the symbol of the rebirth of the city, it’s a symbol of the end of the domination of the Mafia.”