To celebrate 150 years of Italian unification, Italy went back to what it knew best about its traditions and could most celebrate.
National broadcaster RAI treated Italians to a live performance of Giuseppe Verdi’s Nabucco on Italian television last night.
It’s a difficult move to make opera accessible to the population via an entire opera length national broadcast, but for those of us who don’t mind an Italian aria, it wasn’t a bad thing (given the general quality on Italian television, you could do much worse).
Nabucco was broadcast from Rome and before the performance started, the orchestra played the Italian national anthem “Fratelli d’Italia”.
In attendance was Italy’s president Giorgio Napolitano and prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, among other Italian dignitaries.
To hear some of what you missed, see the video after the jump of a performance of Verdi’s Va’ Pensiero.