“The Donizetti affair, musical intrigues in the shadow of Vesuvius”

by time news

twelve o’clock, July 7, 2021 – 20:22

Mario Di Sapio passionately followed in Donizetti’s footsteps, reconstructing an evocative cross-section of his Neapolitan life. A new publication in the fledgling Martin Eden publishing house

On Thursday 8 July 2021 (6 pm), at the Villa dei Marchesi Cappelli in Pollena Trocchia, “L’affaire Donizetti” by Mario Di Sapio (pp. 112, euro 12), fresh off the press for the Martin Eden editions of Naples . They will talk with the author, the archaeologist Antonio De Simone (Suor Orsola Benincasa University), the historian Ciro Raia and the musicologist Domenico Sapio (Conservatorio S. Piero a Majella). Introduces and moderates Giuseppe Pesce.


“Musical intrigues in the shadow of Vesuvius”, concludes the title of the work. How much truth is there in the tradition that Gaetano Donizetti would like to rest in the shade of an olive tree in the Vesuvian countryside of Pollena Trocchia, perhaps in search of inspiration to compose some of his lucky melodramas? What would have pushed the master – born in Bergamo, but who sought success in Naples, but also found many bitternesses – in the small village on the slopes of Mount Somma? And what were your relations with the nobles who came there on holiday, in particular with the powerful minister Santangelo?

Mario Di Sapio passionately followed in Donizetti’s footsteps, reconstructing – through documents, letters, memoirs, biographies – an evocative historical cross-section of the life of “his” Vesuvian village and relations with the capital Naples, in particular with political and cultural heritage of the first half of the nineteenth century.

A journey in which a series of characters recur, from the adventurous writer and journalist Pier Angelo Fiorentino, to the Cavalcanti family; from the Marquis de Sterlich to the singular figure of Ambrogino Caracciolo, for whom he first had the intuition of a touristic development of the Vesuvian area, and whose long article “Donizetti’s olive tree” published in ” La Lettura ”by Corriere della Sera in 1929.

The author, Mario Di Sapio (Naples, 1957), specialist in diseases of the digestive system and nutrition, works at the University of Campania “Luigi Vanvitelli”. However, to the medical profession he unites a passion for modern art, as well as for ancient books and theater, from which – together with the curiosity and pride for his “Vesuvian” roots – this research on Gaetano Donizetti was born.

July 7, 2021 | 20:22

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