The first national museum dedicated to Enrico Caruso will open in Naples

The first national museum dedicated to one of the greatest tenors of all time, Enrico Caruso, was presented today in Rome, in the Spadolini Hall of the Ministry of Culture. The museum will be located in Naples, at the Royal Palace. A single large space, the monumental Doric Hall, will house not just an exhibition of memorabilia, but a true room of wonders, with 3D animations and multimedia platforms, music and film stations and installations, a kaleidoscope of effects aimed at fans, insiders and visitors from all over the world.

It is scheduled to open on July 20, 2023, in the year marking the 150th anniversary of the famous tenor’s birth, in the presence of important authorities representative of Caruso’s strong ties with the United States, such as the mayor of New York and the director of the Metropolitan Opera House.

The presentation was attended by Minister of Culture Gennaro Sangiuliano, Director General of Museums Massimo Osanna, Director of the Royal Palace of Naples Mario Epifani, and curator of the “Caruso Museum,” musicologist Laura Valente.

“Enrico Caruso is an outstanding example of Italian genius, capable of innovating in the wake of tradition while fully understanding how to enhance his talent in the name of modernity. He was the first singer in the history of world music to understand and use the immense potential of the recording industry. The global popularity of Neapolitan song is intimately linked to his name. His personal experience and connection with Naples informed his entire creative output. Nevertheless, Caruso had a troubled relationship with his own city. He brought Naples to the world, and now Naples, one hundred and fifty years after his birth, heals this vulnus by honoring him with a museum that stands in the same complex as his beloved Teatro di San Carlo,” said Culture Minister Gennaro Sangiuliano.

“The establishment of a national museum dedicated to Enrico Caruso in the Sala Dorica of the Royal Palace of Naples is an important milestone for the National Museum System, which will thus be able to give well-deserved prominence to a representative figure of contemporary artistic culture, a tenor recognized worldwide, who departed from Naples and returned to Naples after taking his art all over the world,” said Director Massimo Osanna. “An achievement also for Italian museums that once again demonstrate their ability to update themselves and give voice, with innovative languages, to our history, culture and art in all its expressions. With the announcement of the opening of the Caruso Museum we celebrate today the point of arrival of a great organic and interdisciplinary project, which we have been working on for some time and which has seen collaboration and synergy among institutions and with the project’s many national and international partners. But it is also a starting point, which kicks off with the celebrations of the 150th anniversary of Enrico Caruso’s birth on February 25, 1873, and which will have as its next goal the inauguration of the museum and a rich program of activities and artistic productions.”

“The opening of a permanent museum dedicated to Enrico Caruso is among the interventions financed by the Strategic Plan Major Cultural Heritage Projects,” explained Director Mario Epifani. “The Royal Palace of Naples is thus paying tribute to the great tenor who has had worldwide recognition, but singularly not in the city where he was born and died, until today. A new 500-square-meter exhibition space will be inaugurated, in which his fellow citizens, as well as Italian and foreign visitors, will be able to remember him through his music, his memorabilia, in an exciting multimedia journey. A project made with modern technologies to revive a glorious past.”

“Caruso more than any other is an icon of a noble and legendary Italian-ness, also linked to his dual soul: lyric tenor hailed in the world’s most important theaters (overwhelming successes at La Scala in Milan, star of the Metropolitan in New York from 1903 to ’20), unparalleled interpreter of immortal melodies of Neapolitan song, the first thoroughbred of the recording industry to sell a million records, entering the Olympus of the most popular voices in music history,” said curator Laura Valente.

The initiative benefits from the collaboration of “Carusian” partners from all over the world, starting with the Ricordi and Puccini Archives to the great opera houses with their precious archives, such as San Carlo, La Scala and the Metropolitan to the Cineteca di Bologna, which directed an extraordinary work of restoration and voice synchronization on the film My Cousin, and which allowed the use of images of Caruso as an actor.

The Museum proposes an overall itinerary on Caruso, the first great modern media personality, and on his fundamental contribution to the establishment of a broader network of Italian artists who wrote fundamental pages in the history of the development of the entertainment industry, as well as of the artistic disciplines in which they ventured. The first aspect allows for a fitting tribute that fills a serious gap. The other theme is a proud affirmation of Italian and Neapolitan culture.

Fundamental is the synergy with a “special” donor, Luciano Pituello, who with his Associazione Museo Enrico Caruso, Centro Studi Carusiani in Milan, has dedicated his entire life to collecting memorabilia and original engravings and who has decided to donate most of the rare materials owned by the Museum as an act of generous sharing of a definitive project on the great tenor. The Pituello Fund, already partly destined for the municipality of Lastra a Signa, where the Caruso Museum in Villa Bellosguardo (Caruso’s Italian residence) is located, will be the centerpiece of the new installation in Naples: costumes, records, vintage gramophones, and original sheet music with autographed signs of the artist, with a total value estimated at around one million euros.

The collaboration initiated with the municipality of Lastra a Signa and the mayor Angela Bagni will also make it possible to have for the opening of the museum in Naples extraordinary pieces, such as the costume of Canio (from Ruggero Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci) that belonged to the tenor or the colored watercolors, a unicum in Caruso’s figurative artistic production, to which is added the extremely valuable donation of the famous caricatures dedicated to the greats of music, from Toscanini to Verdi.

On these caricatures artist Gianluigi Colin will draw a new work. Among the many initiatives will be the presentation of the complete biography of Carusi’s entire production, edited by Ugo Piovano and Luciano Pituello. Two prizes will also be established, one to the best great artist and the other dedicated to talented youngsters who, like the great tenor, devoted themselves to singing without any musical training to stimulate them to study and filmed a docufilm on the 150th anniversary celebration of his birth. The Il Saggiatore publishing house will dedicate a publication included in the music studies series to Caruso, a man of the new century.

On Feb. 25, 2023, the 150th anniversary of Caruso’s birth, a meeting with Luciano Pituello and Ugo Piovano in the presence of director Mario Epifani will be held at the Memus Museum of the San Carlo Theater. It will also be an opportunity to enshrine the collaboration with the City of Naples, providing for the donation to the Caruso Museum of the tenor’s birth and death records, preserved from the archives of the city’s city hall. In attendance will be Naples Mayor Gaetano Manfredi, Teatro di San Carlo Superintendent Stéphane Lissner, and Director General Emmanuela Spedaliere.

Main Partners: Municipality of Lastra a Signa, Museo Villa Caruso Bellosguardo, Associazione Caruso Milano, Luciano Pituello.

Partners: Archivio Ricordi; Puccini Foundation; Cineteca di Bologna; Teatro alla Scala, Milan; Teatro San Carlo, Naples; Metropolitan Archives, New York; Archivissima, Turin; Torre del Lago Festival; State Archives, Naples; John Hopkins Peabody Institute, Baltimore; City of Naples; Teche Rai; Discoteca di Stato.

Photo by Emanuele Antonio Minerva.

The first national museum dedicated to Enrico Caruso will open in Naples

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