PAN OPERA FESTIVAL of Panicale Umbria Italy

If your inbox is now getting hit with “Buy An Italian Villa for $1” messages, do know you are not the first to get this memo. Raffaella of Poggio del Pero agriturismo seems to know everyone in Umbria’s easy-to-love hamlet of Panicale, including many expats from the USA, UK and beyond—from well-known movie stars trying to escape the paparazzi, to lesser knowns drawn to Umbria and La Dolce Vita.

American ex-pats are drawn here and as one might expect, their love of all things Italian means there is no small number of opera fans in this crowd. So reports Raffaella’s friend and founder of the Pan Opera Festival, Virgilio Bianconi, who stages three operas in the summer and September months, in the cupcake of a theater – only 32 seats on the first floor!-- you get to see in a Panicale tour.

Watch this fun performance of La Scala di seta, an opera by Gioachino Rossini, staged by the Pan Opera Festival in September, 2018 at the Teatro Cesare Caporali in Panicale.

The planning for these operas actually starts in January, when Bianconi selects the program and begins finding the new season’s collaborators. The artists and musicians – from Italy, Germany, Brazil, Italy, etc.-- work independently until ten days before the performance when they all converge on Panicale to rehearse. The programs feature Rossini, baroque operas, and a comic re-telling of opera’s real world tragic moments called I Disastri, where two tenors tell of times like when Maria Callas lost it during her performance of Tosca, which this writer imagines is made to order for the diehard opera fanatics in the crowd.