Thirty years ago, the people of Bari found themselves parading astonished on the Sunday morning of October 27 in front of the smoking crater of the Petruzzelli theater, destroyed in one night by an arson. These days I am queuing up again in front of the theater which has reopened its spaces with full capacity in the 'new' normality of the pandemic era, to attend the performance of Nabucco. And in the hall, after two years between stops and restrictions, there is an air of festive and rebirth, almost like the one that the city experienced on 4 October 2009 with the reopening of the theater after a difficult reconstruction and 18 years of darkness. "Looking at these 30 years with a positive spirit - analyzes the superintendent of the Petruzzelli Lirico Sinfonica Foundation and Teatri di Bari, Massimo Biscardi - we can say that the disaster offire caused a positive fact, namely that Bari was chosen as the seat of the 14th Opera Foundation (founded in 2003). One thing that changes the life of a city and a region, and which has allowed the Theater to develop in recent years with its musicians, workers, set designers and all the workers, starting an artistic growth that does not take place in a few years ".
From 2014 to today - he adds - the number of curtain rises has grown by 70% and that of attendance has grown by 101%. "We are growing rapidly - he concludes - even if unfortunately the pandemic has interrupted us. an important growth margin and I hope that we will be given the opportunity in defining the new criteria for the Fus to continue growing ".
