New Year’s Eve in Catania – La Repubblica

On New Year’s Eve, Vincenzo Bellini, the composer of La Sonnambula, Norma, I Puritani, returns to Catania to walk the city into the future.

If music is the art of time par excellence and the last night of the year is the party that symbolically celebrates the passage of time, there could not have been a better protagonist and moment to stage our Bellini’s phantasmagoria.

It is a party with music and figures, entirely dedicated to the composer. We called it “Intrecci-Figurazioni in musica for Vincenzo Bellini”: it is the night-show that brings Catania into the new year.

Thanks to the project by Valerio Festi and Monica Maimone, the city is able to watch Bellini’s life and works projected and danced on the facades of the palaces and on the stages set up for the occasion, with flying machineries and vertical choreographies, scenic actions developed fifteen meters high, suspended on invisible cables.

A celebration of beauty that wants to be light, elusive and dense, enveloping at the same time.

Piazza Università and Piazza Duomo are transformed into open-air theaters where the complicated affair of “Adelson and Salvini”, the yearnings of Romeo and Juliet in the “Capulets and Montecchi”, the adventurous evocations of the “Pirate” and the unconscious walks of the “Sonnambula ” are mixed with fragments of the biography and the dazzling career of the Sicilian musician. Loves, successes, romantic melancholies, waltzes, Parisian echoes, evocations of great divas and thunderous enthusiasms for the last night of the year in Catania.