The Nuovo Grande Teatro Giacomo Puccini, an open-air theatre, saw its debut in 2008, which coincided with the celebrations to mark the 150^th anniversary of the composer’s birth. The Puccini Festival is now held here every summer.

The Puccini Festival in Torre del Lago was born in 1930 from an idea of the Maestro. “… I always come out here and take a boat to go and shoot snipes … But once I would like to come here and listen to my work outdoors …” (Puccini to Giovacchino Forzano in November 1924, before leaving for the clinic of Brussels where he died shortly after).

Those words were so engraved in the heart of Forzano (playwright and librettist of Suor Angelica and Gianni Schicchi, director among other works of the first performance of Turandot in Milan, Teatro alla Scala, 25 April, 1926) that after the Maestro’s death he decided to make this dream possible.

On 24 August, 1930, the “Carro di Tespi Lirico”, created at the behest of the National Opera recreational club on the model of prose versions, represented La bohème directed by Forzano with Rosetta Pampanini, Margherita Carosio, Angelo Minghetti and Luigi Montesano, conducted by Pietro Mascagni, a fellow student and roommate of the young Puccini in the years at the Conservatory in Milan.

In 1931 the “Carro di Tespi Lirico” returned to Torre del Lago with two works, La bohème recited by Beniamino Gigli and Adelaide Saraceni, and Madama Butterfly with Rosetta Pampanini and Angelo Michetti, conducted by the maestro Edoardo Vitale, thus marking the beginning of one of the most famous opera festivals, much loved by the public.

The opera seasons continued to be organised in the square in front of the Villa Puccini until 1966, when the theatre, a temporary structure specially assembled and afterwards dismantled every summer, was moved to reclaimed land adjacent to the little port of Torre del Lago.

The Puccini Festival is organised by the Puccini Festival Foundation, founded in 1990 by the town of Viareggio.

www.puccinifestival.it