From February 19 to March 7, 2026, the Teatro dell’Opera di Roma presents Inferno, Lucia Ronchetti’s new work inspired by the first cantica of Dante’s Divine Comedy. Premiering in its Italian version at the Costanzi, the production continues the theatre’s commitment to contemporary creation.
Ronchetti conceives Inferno as a sequence of shifting sonic landscapes that echo Dante’s spiral descent toward the earth’s core. The score draws directly from the poet’s language, transforming text into an immersive musical architecture. Conducted by Tito Ceccherini, the production brings together the Orchestra of the Teatro dell’Opera di Roma, the Ensemble Neue Vocalsolisten, and a cast that includes Laura Catrani, Leonardo Cortellazzi, Andreas Fischer, and Tommaso Ragno as Dante. An original epilogue by Tiziano Scarpa gives voice to Lucifer, silent in Dante’s text yet central to its imagery.
Directed by David Hermann in his Italian debut, the staging relocates the descent into stark contemporary interiors. Medieval landscapes dissolve into desolate rooms inhabited by modern penitents. The journey becomes psychological rather than narrative, less a literal Hell than a confrontation with interior fracture.
It is within this fractured space that Maria Grazia Chiuri introduces the opera’s most striking visual dimension. Rather than invoking historical references, she constructs each character through a vocabulary of contrast, proportion, and restraint. Dante appears in layered outerwear in earthy tones, punctuated by flashes of red that interrupt the silhouette with sudden intensity. The effect is urban and immediate, anchoring the poet in the present rather than in allegory.
Francesca is rendered in sheer, almost weightless fabric, her nude-toned dress traced by red ribbons that cross the body like emotional fault lines. The delicacy of the material contrasts with the violence of the gesture, translating passion into structure. Ulisse emerges through an asymmetrical, organic surface that clings and shifts, suggesting both elemental force and vulnerability. Lucifero stands in severe black tailoring, elongated and sharply cut, his red boots grounding the figure with unsettling authority.
Chiuri reworks elements drawn from sportswear and the everyday, translating them into a stage language that feels contemporary without becoming illustrative. Browns, flesh tones, and abrupt crimson accents create a palette that mirrors the opera’s descent into tension and rupture. Fabric, cut, and proportion articulate psychological states rather than historical period. Costume here is not decorative but structural. It shapes presence, defines space, and sharpens the opera’s confrontation with darkness.
Her return to the Teatro dell’Opera di Roma, following La Traviata directed by Sofia Coppola, reinforces her ongoing dialogue between couture and performance. In this Inferno, fashion does not frame the spectacle. It inhabits it.
