The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
A night at the opera followed by a day on the beach – bravo!
The seaside town where Rossini was born combines Italian style with musical magic, says Paul Richardson
Take one Italian seaside town with a deep vein of culture, add the sunny geniality of Rossini’s music and some great food, and you’re looking at a pretty convincing recipe for la dolce vita. As a local might say: cosa non ti piace? What’s not to like?
Midnight in the piazza of a small Italian town: gangs of tanned young people are nibbling ice creams as they lean on their Piaggios beside a plashing fountain. Meanwhile, a well-turnedout crowd of older folk are streaming out of a 19th- century theatre, heading for open-air bars in which to sip Aperol spritzes in the cool summer night.
Similar scenes could be witnessed in any number of small Italian towns – but Pesaro takes the biscotti. The town itself is a winning combination of historic streets and squares, tree-lined avenues with grand mansions, and a lively seafront promenade on which to take the evening passeggiata.
The long beach of fine white sand is arrayed in the traditional Italian manner, with sunbeds and parasols in neat rows right up to the shoreline, changing rooms for hire, and carpeted paths that tiptoe between serried ranks of immaculate Italian bodies. The water, shallow and clear, is perfect for languid dipping.
For music-lovers, however, the main attraction has to be the Rossini Opera Festival. Composer Gioachino Rossini (17921868) was born in Pesaro, and every August the town celebrates his life and work with operas, concerts, talks and fringe events – this year with added fervour thanks to the 150th anniversary of his death.
I made the journey with boutique operator Travel for the Arts. TFA specialises in beaming down small groups of music buffs into culture hubs such as Vienna, New York and Milan, and can wangle tickets for opera-fests in Wexford, Ravenna, Bayreuth and (a curious novelty) Oman.
Group travel always entails an element of risk, but this time I was lucky: my companions were without exception charming. All 12 (myself included) were passionate music fans and a few were opera geeks in the nicest possible way, trading stories of the big-name singers they’d once swooned over at La Scala or the Met and sparring amiably over the number of Rossini operas they had ticked off over the years – the record being 38 out of a possible 39. One lady, a retired biochemist from Glasgow, had been coming to the festival for 20 years, first with her husband, then as a widow, and had even bought the T-shirt (it said “I ‘heart’ Rossini”).
Launching ourselves into old-town Pesaro in the company of local guide Silvia, it soon became clear we had beamed down into a special place. A seaside town of just under 100,000 souls, Pesaro seemed immune to 21st-century urban ills such as graffiti, litter, begging, tacky souvenir shops and tedious fashion chain stores. The main sounds on the cobbled streets were the gentle clatter of espresso cups and the calls of “ciao” between passers-by on bicycles (which far outnumber cars here).
As we strolled we discovered that, for all its modest size, Pesaro packs a punch in the cultural department. The 13th-century cathedral harbours 8,600 sq ft of Roman mosaic under its floor. The Palazzo Mosca museum’s biggest treasure is the monumental Coronation of the Virgin by Giovanni Bellini, an early-Renaissance marvel of stillness and solemnity.
This was also a notably musical town, fully deserving the Cittá della Musica status bestowed on it last year by Unesco. I saw posters for concerts by singer Cecilia Bartoli and conductor Valery Gergiev alongside billboards with details of the current opera festival and the starry bel canto voices – international names such as Daniela Barcellona, Lisette Oropesa and Juan Diego Flórez – to be seen and heard at the town’s historic little Teatro
Rossini.
Prominently displayed in shop