Celeste Aida

Milano, Museo Teatro alla Scala
from 2006-11-15 to 2007-01-14

The exhibition allowed the visitor to re-live the development, creative process and actual staging of Verdi’s masterpiece, not to mention its success and influence on taste in the period it was performed in. The itinerary started form the manuscript autograph of Aida, exhibited to the public for the first time ever, and shown in all its vitality with the help of multimedia elements that made it accessible even to those with little familiarity to music. The exhibition went on to explore the rich harvest of iconographic material on the staging. It was thus a retrospective that traced the archaeological reconstructions made by costume and scene designers influenced by the Egyptological studies that flourished after Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt in 1798, and extended right up to the Italian colonial expeditions to Egypt in the early 20th century.