Any opera lover must go to Italy at least once in their life. You must experience the passion and drama of opera where it all started and where the very language lends itself to singing. Small towns can look like opera sets in themselves with their own opera house and their own Via or Piazza G. Verdi, G. Puccini, G. Rossini, V. Bellini.

Opera icons are many but the mecca for all performers and lovers of the art must be La Scala in the  sophisticated city of Milan. The Teatro La Scala recently opened after several years of restoration and that other opera icon in Venice, La Fenice, has again risen from the ashes like the phoenix of its name. It was burnt down in 1996 and reopened last year  after eight years of accusations, counter accusations and court wranglings as to the cause of the fire, all so delightfully described in John Berendt’s The City of Falling Angels.

Planning an itinerary for performances in Italian opera houses is not easy since the companies work to a stagione or season system with only one opera on at a time over a one to two week period.  At the Metropolitan Opera in New York or the Sydney Opera House you can see three or four operas in a week, but in Italy you will have to travel from one city to another. This is of course no hardship since the gourmet city of Parma and countryside where Verdi grew up is just one hour away from Milan by train, and top class opera performances can be seen in Turin and Genoa, both with late 20^th century theatres, and the traditional style Teatro Comunale of Bologna, all only a few hours distant. The main seasons are generally from October to May.

There are about 13 major opera companies in the main cities and 25 teatri di tradizione (traditional theatres) in the smaller ones, as well as many summer festivals. There have been such huge threats of government funding cuts that protests of operatic proportions took place late last year. Starting on 17 November in Naples and spreading to other cities, performers, workers and supporters went on a hunger strike and on 25 November all theatres were dark (no performances) in protest. So it remains to be seen how opera funding will be affected by the coming elections since opera companies are politically driven with the mayor of the city usually the chairman of the board.

La Scala must be your first stop. Italians cling to this icon. An Italian friend’s mother had a box at La Scala which had been in the family many years.  When the mother died, the family kept on renewing her subscription since to lose the box meant going on a huge waiting list for another one.  Although this friend doesn’t live in Milan, she goes to La Scala at least once a year since it is “the thing to do” and part of her life.

It is very difficult to get tickets for La Scala especially for an Italian opera and it is very expensive. In all cities Italians flock to performances of their favourites, especially Verdi and Puccini, but you might have more luck with German, French or contemporary operas. In Rome I was amazed at a half empty house for a wonderful production of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin sung in Russian. Increasingly theatres in Italy have surtitles (slides of translation on a screen above the stage) but the translation is in Italian so you need to study up your opera stories in advance. You can still see Italians with librettos or booklets and torches during the performance following the words, as was the custom for many years.

La Scala has a wonderful shop and museum full of opera memorabilia – paintings, photos and letters of famous artists and composers, original music scores and set designs, the costumes and jewels worn by Maria Callas.  Curiously there is even the menu of Verdi’s last supper at the Grand Hotel of Milan the night before he died.  You can also visit backstage. When our guide said we could “sing on the stage of La Scala” we were so overwhelmed by the momentous occasion that we could only think of our national anthem, God defend New Zealand! So be prepared!

It all started in Florence in the late Renaissance about 1,600 with the first opera by Jacopo Peri, La Dafne, from the Greek myth. I have been in search of the exact whereabouts of that first performance in the Renaissance Palazzo Corsi in Via Tornabuoni, one of the most elegant streets of Florence.  It is now the Commercial Bank of Italy completely renovated inside so someone probably works at their office computer in the very spot where opera was born. The Maggio Musicale Fiorentino (May Music Festival) has been going for 69 years and is a major event. Great performances take place here under the artistic directorship of Zubin Mehta.

In the 18^th century opera meant Venice and in that city today you can still imagine Casanova and company masked and cloaked gliding to the opera in a gondola. From those days to the early 20^th century opera was the greatest musical art form in Italy. The opera house was central to everyday life of all classes of people and was usually located near the church and town hall. You went to the opera to see and be seen, to meet people and show off your jewels, to pursue affairs, and not only of the business kind. Not much has changed in this respect with opera going today and again John Berendt’s City of Falling Angels aptly describes this.

In the 1,700s literally hundreds of composers were writing thousands of operas for over 100 opera houses (perhaps a parallel to films today) and the horse-shoe shaped auditorium was deemed to be the best for acoustics. Castrati were the superstars.  Italian style opera spread throughout Europe with Mozart’s operas becoming most popular. By the end of the 19^th century there were over 1,000 theatres which were the focus for political unrest and desire for unification of Italy but interestingly the 13 or so main theatres then are all the same today.

Include in your travels all these theatres for a sense of the history of opera with all the premieres of major composers and debuts of famous singers, for all their fiascos and triumphs: La Scala Milan, Bologna, Genoa, Parma, Turin, Venice, Trieste, Florence, Rome, Naples, Catania and Palermo in Sicily, Cagliari in Sardinia. And don’t forget the smaller towns with their traditional theatres: Lucca where Puccini came from, Pesaro which celebrates Rossini and Bari, with another theatre which it is said was burned down because of the mafia and will be reopened in 2007.

You must also visit that other opera icon of Italy, Verona, at least once in your life and experience spectacular operas under the stars on a summer’s night in the great 2,000 year old Arena. It is traditional for each member of the audience to light candles just before the commencement at 9pm. The experience of seeing up to 16,500 fluttering candles in this huge tiered space is never to be forgotten. Operas have been staged here from June to August since 1913 and Maria Callas made her debut in 1947 in La Gioconda. Due to lack of stage space, sets are unceremoniously hoisted into the piazza outside so that sphinx on the Nile that was so alluring the night before in the broad light of day and seen really up close is just another old prop.

All roads lead to Rome, and apart from the main opera house performances, the traditional summer season at the 2,000 year old Roman Baths of Caracalla has been reinstated. Aida with real elephants in 1967 is a favourite memory. All Puccini lovers must do the Tosca triangle in the historic centre. This famous opera is very much set in Rome of 1800 and you can visit the sites of each act.  Puccini himself went to the top of Castel Sant’Angelo, the Pope’s castle and stronghold, to hear the bells of the churches of Rome at dawn so he would know how to imitate them at the beginning of act three with the shepherd boy’s song. While you cannot climb up there at dawn for the bells, you can certainly stand on the ramparts from where Tosca throws herself at the end of the opera.

I have barely mentioned other great opera icons in Naples and Sicily, the villas of Verdi and Puccini, difficult to get to by public transport but so evocative you expect to meet the composers at their pianos, the famous stories of scandals and fiascos, the home towns of celebrated tenors Carlo Bergonzi in Busseto and Luciano Pavarotti in Modena.

Most opera houses now have websites but tickets are often difficult to purchase from overseas and sometimes performances are cancelled. So when you go to Italy you must “do as the Romans do” and expect the unexpected! You will be rewarded with wonderful and exhilarating opera experiences in the land where opera was born.