Italy: Nicola Piovani new artistic director of Rome’s Globe Theatre

Rome: Italian composer Nicola Piovani has been named the new artistic director of Rome’s Globe Theatre in Villa Borghese, succeeding the late Gigi Proietti who directed its annual Shakespearean festival for 17 years.

The news, reported first by La Repubblica, was announced on Friday during the unveiling of the programme for this year’s festival, now in its 19th summer, which will run from 10 June until 16 October.

Piovani is best known internationally for winning the 1999 Best Original Dramatic Score Oscar for the music in the Roberto Benigni film La Vita è bella, or Life Is Beautiful.

The 2022 programme of the Shakespearean festival, which attracts around 65,000 spectators each year, includes Italian-language productions of Love’s Labour’s Lost, The Merry Wives of Windsor, The Comedy of Errors, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Macbeth.

Last year the Globe Theatre was renamed after Proietti, the much-loved actor, director and comedian who died in November 2020 on his 80th birthday.

The decision was taken in collaboration with the Silvano Toti Foundation, which financed the theatre’s construction in 2003, with the building now titled the ‘Gigi Proietti Globe Theatre Silvano Toti.’

Built in just three months, in the heart of the capital’s Villa Borghese park, the theatre was the result of an idea by Proietti who directed and performed in the festival every year until his death.

Rome’s Globe Theatre is a full-scale timber reproduction of Shakespeare’s Globe, copied from the original oak and thatch designs, and almost identical to the one that stands on London’s South Bank.