The Teatro dell’Opera di Roma is set to celebrate Giacomo Puccini with Puccini’s “Tosca” at the Caracalla Festival.

The opera will be presented from July 5 through August 9 with set design by Massimiliano and Doriana Fuksas. Francesco Micheli will direct and Antonino Fogliani will conduct.

The opera will star  Carmen Giannattasio (July 5, 17, 26; August 3, 7 & 9) and Sonya Yoncheva (July 24 & 31) in the title role. They will be joined by Saimir Pirgu (July 5, 17, 26), Vittorio Grigolo (July 24 & 31), and Arsen Soghomonyan (August 3, 7 & 9).

The role of Scarpia will be interpreted by Claudio Sgura (July 5; August 3, 7 & 9) and Roberto Frontali (July 17, 24, 26 & 31). The cast will be rounded out by Domenico Colaianni (Sagrestano), Saverio Fiore (Spoletta), and Vladimir Sazdovski (Angelotti).

Regarding the production Francesco Micheli said, “Everything in Tosca, starting from the places that mark the three acts, evokes the construction of rules, the use and abuse of power. The city of Rome, which conceived the great spiritual power and that temporal, the Christian church and the Roman empire, sees these two subjects united by an identical form of expression: the Latin capitular alphabet. So, in the installation, we will say things using it: and if Tosca is usually a naturalist work, the absolute space conceived by Massimiliano and Doriana Fuksas will become a sort of parchment on which to print definitive words, obviously in Latin. But the staging also wants to be a tribute to Anna Magnani, because just as Tosca is Rome, Rome is Anna Magnani. So much so that in the film Avanti a lui trepiva tutto Roma she is a sort of twentieth-century Tosca, a partisan who fights for freedom.”