Between the last week of June and the second of July Spoleto is transformed and the whole city becomes a great stage for internationally renowned artists and young musicians who wish to make their art known.
From prose to concerts, from opera to ballet, a program full of events for one of the most prestigious international festivals.
Founder of the Festival dei Due Mondi di Spoleto is the master composer Gian Carlo Menotti (who died in 2007), who established the event in 1958. From the mid-nineties until 2007, the artistic director was the son Francis Menotti. Before him we remember the directions of Romolo Valli and Raffaello De Banfield. The current artistic director is Maestro Giorgio Ferrara.
Menotti chose Spoleto as the venue for the festival due to the presence of the two theaters.
The artists and characters who took part in it belong to the field of prose, lyric, dance, marionette art, oratory art, music, cinema and painting. In the eighties the medical-scientific review Spoletoscienza was also established, at which conferences scientists and researchers take part.
At the beginning of the 2000s, internal frictions to financial and administrative management are maturing.
On June 29, 2007, the fiftieth edition of the Festival kicked off, the first without the presence of the founder Gian Carlo Menotti, who died a few months earlier: his opera “Maria Golovin” was staged for the occasion.
In autumn 2007, the minister of cultural heritage in charge Francesco Rutelli, called upon to find a solution to the long-standing internal friction of the management of the festival machine, assigns Giorgio Ferrara the task of relaunching the event and appointing him artistic director.