‘Il paese dei campanili’: On the Origins of Italian Operetta

Operetta, with its well-structured production systems, constituted a dynamic sphere of activity that stretched across Unified Italy. This activity was rarely acknowledged by the representatives of so-called ‘high culture’, even as it stimulated the growth of the social structures that would later give rise to cinema and other forms of mass entertainment. Though in recent years scholars have focused on the foreign influences on light music theatre in Italy in the years following Italian unification, little attention has been bestowed on Italian operetta. This article concentrates on the origins of this genre, offering a detailed analysis of the dialect theatre tradition from which the first French-style operetta productions in Italy emerged. Specifically, I examine the urban contexts of Milan and above all Rome, a city of crucial importance in the diffusion of operetta in dialect, whose highly local (even parochial) connotations would exert a significant influence on the formal, social and cultural evolution of operetta right up to the turn of the century.