A Spectacular Summer of Live Music in Verona

Verona's Arena gets the postcards, but ask a local where they would rather see a concert and many will point across the river: to the Teatro Romano, the first-century amphitheatre carved into the hillside of San Pietro, where the stage sits at the bottom of two thousand years of stone and the city glows on the far bank of the Adige. Every summer the Estate Teatrale Veronese fills it with music and theatre, and this year's "Contaminazioni Musicali" series has assembled a line-up worth planning a trip around. The next date is Saturday 25 July, with Daniele Silvestri. Thirty years into one of the most consistently intelligent careers in Italian songwriting, Silvestri remains a marvel live — funny, political, musically restless, capable of following a piano ballad with a horn-driven groove without dropping a stitch. "Salirò" will get the biggest cheer, but it is the deep cuts, delivered in a venue this intimate, that people will still be talking about on the walk home. After the August interval, the series resumes on Saturday 29 August with Joan Thiele. The Italian-Colombian singer has become one of the most interesting figures in the new Italian scene, drifting between cinematic soul, trip-hop and Italian-language pop with a voice that seems made for warm night air. The Roman theatre, lights low, should suit her perfectly. A week later, on Saturday 5 September, Coez brings "From The Rooftop" to the hillside. His melodic rap has soundtracked a decade of Italian summers, and this stripped-back tour format — closer to a listening session than an arena show — is the most affecting version of him yet. And on Wednesday 23 September, the season closes with Lisa Agnelli's pop-rock concert, a homegrown finale to a summer of music above the river. Part of the joy of a Teatro Romano show is the ritual around it. You cross the Ponte Pietra — itself Roman, rebuilt stone by stone after the war — as the swallows start their evening circuits, climb the steps as the sun drops behind the city, and take your seat on stones that have hosted audiences since the reign of Augustus. Stay in your seat a moment when the show ends: the view of Verona lit up across the Adige is the encore nobody announces. If you are visiting, the concerts pair beautifully with the rest of the city. Juliet's balcony and the Arena are a short walk away for the obligatory daytime rounds, but leave time for the quieter Verona — the cloister of San Zeno, the view from Castel San Pietro directly above the theatre, an evening bicchiere of Valpolicella in a Piazza delle Erbe cafe. And opera lovers should remember that the Arena's own summer festival runs in parallel: between the two venues, Verona in late summer offers more world-class music per square metre than almost anywhere in Europe. Dates, venues and official ticket links for every Estate Teatrale Veronese show — plus events across the whole of Italy — are on The Local Art Hub events pages, updated daily. And if a night in a Roman theatre convinces you that live performance belongs at your own next event, our platform is the place to discover and book wonderful local artists. Ci vediamo al teatro.