The Song of the Dolomites

Hiking up a mountain is definitely not for everyone, but even the most reluctant of up-hillers (and there are a few of them around me, if the heavy panting and ragged gasping I can hear is anything to go by) would probably concede that the view from the top almost always makes all the exertion worthwhile.

The rewards are all that and more as we approach the end of our hike in the Pian della Nana. We are at 2,090m, in a natural amphitheatre shaped millions of years ago by receding glaciers. And, out of breath though we hikers may be, the same cannot be said of the opera singers, whose soaring voices are carried on the pure mountain air and held within our hearing by the encircling mountains.

Although today’s lowering clouds, pregnant with the threat of rain, seem better suited to a tragedy, the opera we’ve come to watch is the comic Il Barbiere di Siviglia (The Barber of Seville), one of the