Larger than Life: Verona’s Opera Props

When you are producing operas on a grand scale, you need props to match. And since in Verona, Italy, the opera venue is a 1st-century Roman arena that can seat 30,000 and have room left over for a soccer field, the props tend to be really big.

So big that they have to be stored outside the arena during the season, to be lifted over the arena wall by a crane, where they’re assembled, shifted and adjusted by crowds of stagehands and mechanics.

Outside the arena, in a corner of Piazza Bra, the focus point  of Verona’s historic center, you could almost believe you were in a museum of odd antiquities or of surrealist sculpture…

It can actually be an amusing game to walk around and try to identify which props are for which opera. In today’s set, many are for Aida, set in Egypt, which is a nearly-annual feature in the repertoire.

But these are not from Aida, and they weren’t in Carmen either. Any guesses? And I’ll start by saying that Der Rosenkavalier was not on this summer’s program. And neither was Little Shop of Horrors.

For a look inside the Arena’s opera program, see the October 10 Gumbo blog Verona: A Night at the Opera