Vacallo in the year of Puccini

Giacomo Puccini returns to Vacallo on the centenary of his death, 29 November 1924.

Born in Lucca on 22 December 1858 into a family of musicians, with the help of a scholarship he managed to enrol in the composition course at the Milan Conservatory. It was the year 1880 and Puccini lived in rented accommodation that he shared with his younger brother and a few other companions, including the musician Pietro Mascagni. It was a period of economic hardship and various difficulties, from which the composer only emerged in 1893 when his opera Manon Lescaut, staged at the Teatro Regio in Turin, brought him his first great success that made him famous abroad.

Considered the greatest opera composer who lived at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, Puccini was able to bring the dramas of everyday life to the stage of musical theatre, merging a remarkable 
dramatic effectiveness with a lyricism full of poetry. Vacallo and its surroundings had been the favourite holiday resort of the Puccini family: from August to November 1888, then in the summer of 1889, again from July to November 1890, and in the summer of 1892.

Various anecdotes are reported about Puccini's days in our country, and we will be able to discover them during this long year through the numerous events on the calendar.

©??????? Grafica Tobler