The ‘spectacle of the Parma shows’ returns to the stage. The mythological opening Naumachia of the Teatro Farnese will raise the curtain, thanks to the voice of art storyteller Luca Scarlini. He will reenact it together with sound effects by Spartaco Cortesi on Saturday 22nd March at 6.30 pm.
It will be a grand theatre of water, the one of the ambitious Farnese marriage, the sumptuous machine that lasted only one show and then plunged into the squalor of ghosts, back to its best day…
(Luca Scarlini)
The Farnese theatre will return to its most famous and ephemeral moment: water will flood it again and tell us how in time everything flows and everything remains. It will be a spirited ‘son et lumière’ session, the mediumistic evocation of a marvellous mid-seventeenth-century event that was remembered in everyone’s memory.
The wooden architecture of the Farnese will return […] to the clamorous inauguration in December 1628, a central event in the vicissitudes of Italian Baroque theatre, which was intended to celebrate the sumptuous wedding that united the Farnese and Medici families.
(Stefano L’Occaso, Director of the Complesso monumentale della Pilotta)
Parma will relive it by celebrating World Water Day 2025.
We have chosen an ephemeral but truly extraordinary page of the Parmesan baroque, which will be re-proposed in a pop key for an evocative and popular event, to which a message regarding environmental urgency is added. We wanted the Farnese naumachia on World Water Day to underline how water, today, cannot be considered a game or a privilege, but must be experienced and defended as a precious and universal element.
(Lorenzo Lavagetto , Deputy Mayor and Councillor for Culture and Tourism, City of Parma)
The event is organised in collaboration with the Municipality of Parma.