Opera at the Arena di Verona: two thousand years of spectacle in the same stones

It was 10 August 1913. The night was warm, the sky above Verona thick with stars, and the Arena was packed as it had not been in centuries. In the stalls and on the terraces, Veronese locals were mixed with visitors who had arrived from every corner of Europe and the Americas. In the audience were Giacomo Puccini, Pietro Mascagni, Arrigo Boito. And somewhere in the crowd, a thirty-one-year-old Czech writer making notes: Franz Kafka.

On the stage, among monumental sets featuring Egyptian columns as tall as the Roman arches, Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida was being performed. It was the first opera ever staged in the amphitheatre. The success was overwhelming. The next day’s newspapers wrote of ‘the delirious enthusiasm of a cosmopolitan crowd’. And on that August night, almost by accident, the greatest open-air opera season in the world was born.

But the Arena had been standing for almost two thousand years. And its history, before arriving at that night in August, had been anything but romantic.

From blood to music: what happened in the Arena before opera

The Arena was built around 30 AD, between the reigns of Augustus and Claudius. Its original purpose was unambiguous: to host gladiatorial combat, hunts of wild and exotic animals, and public spectacles of all kinds. It could hold approximately thirty thousand spectators. In the terms of its time, it was a stadium.

Gladiators were mostly slaves trained in combat, divided into categories according to their weapons and armour: the murmillo with shield and sword, the retiarius with net and trident, the secutor with helmet and short blade. They fought in bouts that were often to the death, before crowds that cheered and jeered. Pliny the Younger explicitly mentions the Arena di Verona in a letter, referring to gladiatorial games offered to the city in memory of a deceased wife. But Roman amphitheatres were not only places of violence: they also hosted theatrical performances, musical events and public ceremonies. The connection between Verona and music that the Arena guided tour describes as something that “has its roots in the Roman era” is not a poetic flourish — it is documented history.

With the fall of the Roman Empire and the rise of Christianity, gladiatorial games were formally banned by Emperor Honorius in 404 AD. The Arena remained standing, but entered a long period of transformation and partial abandonment. In the Middle Ages it became a venue for trial by combat: those involved in uncertain legal disputes could appoint a professional fighter to contest their case in front of a crowd. Dante, during his time in Verona, attended at least one such bout and described it in a canto of the Inferno.

In 1278, inside the Arena, approximately two hundred Cathar heretics were burned at the stake. Medieval tournaments were held here. In the Venetian period, bullfights between bulls and mastiffs drew the crowds. In 1805, Napoleon attended a performance here. The very stones that today support the opera stage have witnessed things that are difficult to imagine when you see it lit up on a summer evening.

How to save an amphitheatre: the decisions that kept the Arena standing

The Arena did not survive on its own. It survived through a series of deliberate decisions, made over the centuries, that prevented its demolition or final decay.

The first major threat came almost immediately. Under the rule of Theodoric in the fifth and sixth centuries, the outer ring of the amphitheatre was partly demolished: the stone was needed for the city’s new defensive walls, and the Arena’s height — thirty metres, well above the city walls — made it a military liability, since an enemy could occupy it as a raised fortress from which to control and attack the city below. Of the magnificent outer ring, which originally surrounded the entire amphitheatre with seventy-two arches on three levels, only a fragment of four arches remains today: the so-called Ala, which can still be seen projecting from the main body like a surviving scrap of original facade.

In 1117, a violent earthquake — the most powerful recorded in northern Italy up to that point — destroyed much of what remained of the outer ring. The fallen stones were reused in other buildings across the city. But the inner cavea, the seating section, remained substantially intact.

It was during the Renaissance that the Arena found its first genuine defenders. Artists and architects including Giovanni Maria Falconetto, Fra Giovanni da Verona, and later Andrea Palladio began to study it, survey it, and publish drawings of it. Renaissance culture had rediscovered antiquity as something to be valued, and the Arena was suddenly seen as a monument to be preserved rather than a quarry for stone. In 1537, the colony of prostitutes who had occupied the outer archways for centuries was permanently removed, replaced by artisans and traders. In the sixteenth century, the first systematic restoration of the cavea began.

The most significant twentieth-century work took place between 1953 and 1960: structural consolidation using high-tensile steel cables, recovery of the archways from improper use, repaving, and restoration of the entire outer ring. It was during those years that the Arena took on the appearance it has today.

10 August 1913: how a chance idea became a century-old tradition

The idea of bringing opera to the Arena arose almost as a joke. Giovanni Zenatello, a Veronese tenor of international reputation, was one day inside the amphitheatre with friends. Almost on a whim, he sang an aria. Everyone was struck by the extraordinary acoustics: his voice filled the Arena without amplification, bouncing off the ancient stone with unexpected perfection.

The idea took shape quickly. It was 1913, the centenary of Giuseppe Verdi’s birth. Zenatello persuaded the theatrical impresario Ottone Rovato to organise a major performance in the amphitheatre. The choice of opera was natural: Aida, Verdi’s most spectacular work, the one that called for live elephants on stage, enormous choruses, monumental sets. An opera made for vast spaces.

The sets were entrusted to Ettore Fagiuoli, a young Veronese architect with no theatrical experience whatsoever. Precisely for that reason — the organisers reasoned — he would approach the problem without preconceptions. Fagiuoli made a radical decision: he eliminated the very concept of a painted backdrop. The Arena’s terraces and arches in red Veronese stone would themselves become part of the scenography. In front of them he placed enormous free-standing columns, giant statues, drapes. The ancient Egypt of Aida and Roman Verona overlapped visually, creating an effect that no enclosed theatre could have replicated.

On the evening of 10 August 1913, the amphitheatre was full to capacity. Spectators had arrived from across Italy and Europe, with fights and crushing crowds at the entrances. The success was immediate and absolute. The following year the season was repeated. And since then — except for the forced interruptions of the two world wars and the pandemic of 2020 — the Arena di Verona has hosted the Opera Festival every summer, bringing to its stage Maria Callas, Luciano Pavarotti, Plàcido Domingo, Franco Zeffirelli as artistic director, and hundreds of thousands of spectators from around the world every year.

Aida is the only opera to have appeared in every single edition of the festival without exception. It has become something close to an anthem: the famous triumphal march is sung in the stadium by supporters of the Verona football club.

Visiting the Arena: by day and by night

The Arena can be visited during the day as a monument and museum: you enter the cavea, walk on the same terraces where Roman spectators once sat, look down at the stage and up at the Ala. The structure tells two thousand years of history in the most direct way possible — original stonework, entrance vomitoria, underground corridors, the surviving fragment of the outer ring.

In the evening, during the summer season, the experience is completely different. The 103rd edition of the Opera Festival runs from 12 June to 12 September 2026, with a programme combining the great titles of the operatic tradition with concerts and musical events. Tradition holds that every spectator should bring a candle: when the lights go down and thousands of flames are lit across the terraces, one of the most extraordinary visual effects in Verona is created. There is no amplification: voices and orchestra fill the Arena thanks to the natural acoustics that Zenatello discovered by chance a century ago.