Ah, Italian opera!
That wonderful delirium that begins with a cough in the audience and ends with a tenor fainting backstage because he gave his all — even the last syllable.

And even if it didn't go very well, it always ends with applause that you never know whether it's for the voice or for the courage.

It is the pride of us Italians, our delirium, our most elegant neurosis.

It's like red wine: even if you're forced to stop drinking it, you want to know it exists.

It all began in the 17th century, in a Florence that believed itself to be Athens.

A small group of musicians and philosophers, people who talked more than they played, gathered in a salon for a revolution: “Let's let the music speak,” they said.

But not with Greek choruses, continuously, with “bel canto”, which is ours alone!

And so Euridice, by Jacopo Peri, was born.

A story of love, death and return from the underworld.

In short, even then, Italy knew what to sell well: drama.

It was the 1600s, and we were already singing instead of saying things clearly and directly.

A people destined to express themselves melodramatically, even when asking for a coffee.

Then came Claudio Monteverdi, the first true director of the soul, a conductor of emotional chaos.

With L'Orfeo, he took the myth and gave it a heart, pain, a baroque trumpet and a lot of patience.

It was the beginning of melodrama: life staged with the voice, while the audience wondered whether to cry or applaud with a smile.

From then on, theatre would never be the same again: people sang to say what they couldn't say.

And we Italians, as we know, are masters of unsaid, sighed and metaphorical things.

In the 18th century, opera exploded like a pot of beans with pork rinds forgotten on the stove.

Venice, Naples, Rome: theatres everywhere, castrati everywhere, still few women.

Even Antonio Vivaldi, between seasons, slips in a few operas full of storms and endless love.

A drama industry with an asterisk that would make Netflix pale in comparison today.

Then Gioacchino arrives.

A young man who writes faster than people can breathe.

A genius with a penchant for irony and a passion for cooking.

With Il barbiere di Siviglia, he invents lightness, the kind that makes you laugh but then stays with you,

like a grateful but no longer loving glance after a farewell.

Rossini was the only one who could make a tenor laugh without offending him.

He wrote arias like a pizza maker makes margherita pizzas: one after the other, perfect, fragrant, and always with the impression that he has added a little extra mozzarella.

Then he retires at the age of 37.

He says, “That's it, I've said everything.”

And he spends the rest of his life cooking.

A national hero, ladies and gentlemen.

We come to the nineteenth century.

The era when even feelings had moustaches.

The giants Donizetti and Bellini imposed themselves, two poets of breath, cigars, fever and love.

Their heroines all died, but always in tune.

Because if you have to breathe your last, better to do it with grace and a clean A flat.

And then he appeared: Giuseppe Verdi.

A farmer, a visionary, a patriot with a pen and anger.

Verdi did not write music: he wrote Italy.

Nabucco, Rigoletto, La Traviata, Aida...

Each time, a theatrical and political coup.

Everything is in there: hunger, hope, misery, dignity.

There is the smell of bread and gunpowder.

The chorus of Nabucco, “Va” pensiero',

becomes the anthem of a people who do not yet know they are a people.

The audience does not just applaud the music: they applaud themselves.

And for a moment, Italy sings in unison.

Then it goes back to arguing, of course.

But that moment... is pure beauty.

And then there is La Traviata, the most scandalous of all.

A “malaya” who loves, suffers and dies.

And the bourgeois audience, indignant and moved, understands that the truth is there:

in fragility, in the voice, in the broken breath.

Verdi makes even the right-thinking cry.

A breath of miracle, more than an aria.

And finally... when everything seems already written,

here comes Giacomo Puccini, the master of modern emotions.

With him, opera becomes cinema.

No longer gods and kings, but real people: poets, sick girls, geishas,

people who suffer without philosophy but with authentic despair.

Mimì, Tosca, Madama Butterfly, Turandot...

Each character is a wound, a farewell, a letter never sent.

Puccini knows that love does not save.

But he makes it sing as if it could.

And in that illusion... there is all of Italy.

There is tenderness and cruelty, there is the hope that something will change and the certainty that it will not.

But in the meantime, while a soprano sings “Vissi d'arte”,

we remember that beauty is the only true religion left.

The twentieth century arrives and sweeps away dreams like an evil wind.

People no longer want heroes, they want truth.

And so verismo and everyday tragedy are born.

Mascagni with Cavalleria Rusticana,

Leoncavallo with Pagliacci.

Jealous peasants, betrayed lovers, real blood on stage.

It is melodrama that becomes crime news.

Opera descends from its pedestal and stains its shirt with wine and anger.

“Laugh, Pagliaccio”...

And the audience laughs.

But with a strange grimace.

Because they understand that the mask is theirs.

Then the stage of reality changes.

Radio, cinema and television arrive.

And opera remains there, a little out of place, like an elegantly old-fashioned grandmother in a disco.

But it does not die.

It resists.

Every time a soprano sings “O mio babbino caro”, every time a tenor opens his heart with “Nessun dorma”, something awakens in us.

Because we love our dear old grandmothers.

Because opera is not old: it is eternal.

It is the voice that reminds us of who we were, when we still knew how to transform suffering into beauty, and beauty... into a note that never ends.

This is Italy, a country that continues to sing, even when it has lost its voice.