Giacomo Puccini
Giacomo Antonio Domenico Michele Secondo Maria Puccini, one of the most important Italian opera composers of all time La Bohème, Tosca, Madama Butterfly, Turandot are among the most popular and performed in the world.
Lover of hunting, cars, and women, an elegant dandy and gourmet and generous. He bought 14 cars, including a wonderful Isotta Fraschini, a Ferrari, and some Fiats. However, they did not allow him to go off-road, something he loved to do during his hunting trips. So he asks Vincenzo Lancia to create for him a car with a reinforced chassis and suitable wheels. A sort of first SUV. It costs him 35 thousand lire, (150 thousand euros today). He also buys five motorboats and a yacht that he names Cio-Cio-San (geisha from Madama Butterfly).
Wealth comes precisely from the success of his works composed mostly in the peace of Torre del Lago, in a residence equipped with all the modern conveniences of the time: electricity, telephone, central heating.
This love for luxury was also a reaction to the poverty and hardships experienced in his youth. He was not born into a wealthy family, quite the opposite. He became an orphan of his father and in a letter to his mother when he was just over 20 years old, he complains about not being able to afford a subscription to La Scala which then cost 130 lire, about 600 euros today. So in 1876, when he was only eighteen, he walks from Lucca to Pisa with friends to see the Aida because he could not afford either a train ticket or a carriage. Verdi's opera is a revelation for him and at that moment he understands that this would be his path.
A generous, affectionate man, a gentleman, friend of Stravinsky, Toscanini. Turandot is his last opera, left unfinished. On April 25, 1926 at La Scala, Toscanini conducts the premiere right up to where Puccini had succumbed to death. «Here the performance ends because at this point the Maestro is dead.»
In the show In fila per 6 col resto di 2 you heard Giacomo Puccini's aria Nessun Dorma from the opera Turandot.
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Perhaps not everyone knows that the Circoscrizione 6 hosts as many as 42 streets and squares named after great musicians, composers, and Italian conductors, giving rise to a very particular toponymic context.
If we really want to proceed with a non-discriminatory project towards great musicians, we need to take a few more steps towards the center up to Via Giuseppe Verdi and Via Gioacchino Rossini...being stars of the international opera we risk seriously offending them.
In these years we will discover together the 44 great musicians who bring to life a special neighborhood in Turin, they are all neighbors!
Let's start with Antonio Vivaldi, Amilcare Ponchielli, Niccolò Paganini, Ruggero Leoncavallo, Alessandro Scarlatti, Giacomo Puccini.
The project is realized thanks to the City of Turin.