Italian stage director and set designer. He made his opera debut at the Teatro Greco in Syracuse as the director and set designer in Mascagni's Cavalleria rusticana and Leoncavallo's I Pagliacci. Major opera credits at the time incldue Rigoletto for the Arena Sferisterio in Macerata (in collaboration with Alfred Krauss), a modernised version of Marinuzzi's Jaquerie for the Teatro Bellini in Catania and Cavalleria rusticana/Pagliacci (Sewilla). He also created memorable set and costume designs for stage productions of plays by Dacia Maraini, Giovanni Verga, and Luigi Pirandello for the Teatro Stabile, Catania. In the mid-1970s he became deputy head of production at Milan's La Scala and subsequently was head of production at the Teatro Massimo in Catania, Arena Sferisterio in Macerata, and the Rome Opera.
He collaborated with such well-known directors and designers as Pier Luigi Pizzi, Silvano Bussotti, Franco Enriquez, Aldo Mirabella Vassallo, Antonio Calenda, Giorgio Presburgher, Jurij Lubimow, Lamberto Puggelli, Luca Ronconi, Luciano Damiani, Giorgio Strehler, and Franco Zeffirelli.
He famously directed and designed opera productions of Adrianna Lecouvreur, Capuleti i Montecchi, Carmen, La bohème, Il barbiere di Siviglia, Edgar, La favorita, Jaquerie, Lakmé, Lucia di Lammermoor, Madama Butterfly, I Puritani, Tosca, Werther, and L'Italiana in Algeri; staged Aida, Un ballo in maschera, La forza del destino, Nabucco, Rigoletto, La traviata, and Il torvatore as well as a range of theatre plays. He also designed sets and costumes for Il barbiere di Siviglia, Don Carlos, La fanciulla del West, Macbeth, Medium, Simon Boccanegra, Tannhäuser, Le nozze di Figaro, and Bluebeard's Castle, as well as such ballet productions as Auranzia, Coppelia, Giselle, Fedra, Il quadro delle Meraviglie, A Midsummer Night's Dream and many theatre plays. He also designed sets for such television shows as Un’ora d’amore, La Père Goriot, and the feature film Palermo oppure Wolfsburg (Golden Bear, Berlin International Film Festival).
His productions were staged across Italy, in Bari, Bergamo, Brescia, Cagliari, Cremona, Florence, Lecce, Macerata, Naples, Palermo, Rome, Syracuse, Taormina, Trieste, Torino, and Verona, and abroad, in Bilbao, Berlin, Dresden, Jerez, Copenhagen, Las Palmas, Paris, Reykjavik, Seville, Valencia, Caracas, and Baltimore. The Warsaw production of Aida marked the artist's Polish debut.
(photo: Polish National Opera archives)
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