The exhibition “ ROF 15K. The freedom of the gaze in the Rossinian visual imagination ”, created thanks to the work of the ROF Laboratories which led to the restoration of 24 scene models of some of the main works set up in the 42-year Festival.

Curated by Cristian Della Chiara on an installation project by Bruno Mariotti, CH +, with the contribution of the Cassa di Risparmio di Pesaro Foundation, the exhibition was created by the ROF Laboratories together with Sistema Museo and, for the multimedia part, by Marco Lipsticks, Imergo. The direction and video productions are by Alberto Giuliani, the photographs by Studio Amati Bacciardi.

On 28 August 1980 the curtain of the Rossini Theater was raised for the first performance of the Gazza ladra, the inaugural show of the number one edition of the Rossini Opera Festival. Wednesday, September 22, 2021, exactly 15,000 days have passed since that date. The impact of the ROF on the city and its identification with it is a bond that has been affirmed and renewed every day for over forty years, and this is why the choice of the day as a unit of measurement for calculating age seemed very pertinent. of the Festival.

In over forty years of history, the “ musicology plus theater ” formula has established itself through the experience of the ROF: a laboratory of applied musicology, implemented side by side with the scholars of the Rossini Foundation. The areas of reciprocal autonomy between musicological research and modern theatrical restitution were thus defined, summarized in the formula: maximum respect for the authentic musical lesson, maximum freedom in the criteria of the staging.

This is why the history of the Festival is also well told through some of the most extraordinary settings that have populated its stages, given a new life through the scene models, first work tools and now masterpieces of craftsmanship, which will restore the spectator's wonder of the knowledge of hands and the creation of mind and soul that has characterized a long history of theater in music in the city of Pesaro.