The Festival usually takes place between June and July, concluding with the traditional final concert in the splendid Piazza Duomo. During the event, the city experiences the enchantment of a cultural ferment that transforms squares, theatres, palaces and hidden corners into places where art, in all its forms, is produced and breathed.
Besides the official festival programme there is a variety of side events that contribute to the magical festival atmosphere: improvised performances, shows and parties in public and private venues, where you can easily come across well-known artists and personalities.
The first 50 years of the Festival's history have been inextricably linked to the figure of its creator, the Italian-American composer Gian Carlo Menotti (Pulitzer Prize winner in 1950 and 1955), who intended it to be ‘a meeting ground between two cultures and two artistic worlds, the American and the European’, hence the name ‘of the two worlds’. It is thanks to Maestro Menotti, his visionary intuition and his extraordinary ability to combine tradition and contemporaneity, that the Festival dei Due Mondi and the city itself have gained worldwide fame, attracting illustrious personalities and art enthusiasts from all over the world.
The 16th-century palace adjacent to Piazza Duomo has been Menotti's house for many years; it now houses 'Casa Menotti', the Documentation Centre of the Festival dei Due Mondi, a small museum that displays the Maestro's piano as well as audio, video and photographic material relating to the editions of the Festival from 1958 to the present day. A sort of journey through time to rediscover emotions and atmospheres linked to the Festival dei Due Mondi and its unforgettable founder.
