“I’m not saying that a visit to the opera in Italy is a visit to a world of lost content in which opera is woven into the whole fabric of Italian vernacular life. It isn’t. I love the true story of Verdi and a visitor driving a horse and carriage along a lane near Busseto one afternoon and encountering a party of farm workers who doff their caps and spontaneously break into a chorus from I Lombardi. But it’s not like that now. Modern Italy, like Bertolucci’s Novecento, starts with the death of Verdi. We must stop ourselves sentimentalising about it. And yet you can’t be in Milan for long on the opening day of the Scala season without realising something peculiar to Italy is occurring.”