FRIDAY NOVEMBER 14, 2025
15:00: Choral Competition, Category B – Sacred Music (Church of Servi)
21:00: Not competitive concert (Church of Servi)
SATURDAY NOVEMBER 15, 2025
10:00 – 12:30: Choral Competition, Category D – Children Choirs (Church of Servi)
16:30: Sung Mass with the participant choirs (optional, Church of St. Agostino)
21:00: Not competitive concert (Church of Servi)
21:00: Not competitive concert (Church Mater Admirabilis, Riccione)
SUNDAY NOVEMBER 16, 2025
9:30 – 11:30: Choral Competition, Category A – Secular Music (Theatre Galli)
12:00 – 14:00: Choral Competition, Category C – Folk/Pop/Gospel (Theatre Galli)
17:00: The Jury meets the conductors of the participant choirs (Theatre Galli)
21:00: Choral Competition, Category X – Grand Prix (Theatre Galli)
22:30: Awarding and Closing Ceremony (Theatre Galli)
The venues of the Competition:
Teatro Amintore Galli – Map – Piazza Cavour – Rimini
A neoclassical work by the last of the great papal architects, the Modenese Luigi Poletti (1792-1869), Rimini’s Teatro Nuovo, built between 1843 and 1857 at the expense of the Municipality and a shareholders’ company, is inaugurated in the summer of 1857 with a memorable opera season by Giuseppe Verdi (the only case in Italy), who presents a new opera Aroldo, composed especially for the occasion. The inaugural cast is first-rate: soprano Marcellina Lotti Della Santa (Mina), tenor Emilio Pancani (Aroldo), baritone Gaetano Ferri (Egberto). Conductor: the celebrated Angelo Mariani. The outcome is triumphant. The theatre functions brilliantly for almost a century until 1943, when on 28 December, during the most devastating bombing raid on Rimini, it is hit by bombs: the roof above the stage, part of the rear façade and part of the roof above the auditorium collapse. The balcony of the 4th order and some boxes are damaged. In the post-war period looting and hasty demolition demolished the tiers of boxes and part of the side walls. The theatre in Rimini is, with the Basilica of San Paolo fuori le Mura in Rome, the masterpiece of Poletti, author of two other theatres in Terni and Fano. Exalted in his lifetime, then forgotten, the architect is now decidedly re-evaluated, so much so as to be defined by Anna Maria Matteucci as ‘the greatest Italian theatre architect of his time’ (Il teatro nelle Marche. Architettura, scenografia e spettacolo, Florence, 1997). Among the first to note the significance of the innovations introduced by Poletti to the Italian theatre were Simon Tidworth (Theaters: an Architectural and Cultural History, New York, 1973) and Manfredo Tafuri (Teatri e scenografie, Milan, 1977). A proponent of architectural purism, opposed to the serial repetitiveness of the various tiers of boxes, the loggione-picnicionaia, the narrow and badly lit staircases, in favour instead of the unity of style that favours the Vanvitellian giant-order colonnade, Poletti proposed a reform. The foyer becomes large, the staircases are spacious and spectacular; the auditorium, for acoustic and visual reasons, progressively widens from the bottom to the top; the boxes are included in the colonnade, varying from order to order according to laws of harmony; the gallery is transformed into an airy balcony with the vault still high set on the perimeter wall; a typology that would later be adopted in numerous theatres in the Marche and Romagna. In 1859 the theatre was dedicated to Vittorio Emanuele II. In 1916 the building was damaged by an earthquake and closed. After restoration, the theatre reopened in 1923 with Zandonai’s opera Francesca da Rimini. Between 1928 and 1931 architect Gaspare Rastelli completed the ridotto (later Sala Ressi) and the gallery on the upper floor. The very active impresario Ciro Ragazzini, originally from Sant’Agata Feltria, managed to recruit the best singers and musicians; Pietro Mascagni was on the conductor’s podium in 1926 with Il piccolo Marat; great conductors such as Antonio Guarnieri succeeded one another and famous singers such as Bonci, Borgatti, Cigna, Favero, Galeffi, Gigli, Lauri Volpi, Lugo, Melis, Merli, Minghini Cattaneo, Pinza, Raisa, Saraceni, Stignani, Pagliughi, Parmeggiani, Pertile, Del Monaco performed on stage. In the spring of 1943, Puccini’s Madama Butterfly was the last opera performed. In 1947, the half-destroyed theatre was dedicated to the musician Amintore Galli (1845-1919). In 1955, the initiative of the Cassa di Risparmio, which had launched a national competition for the reconstruction of the theatre, failed. In 1959, the damaged part of the building, covered by an asbestos roof, was used as an exhibition hall. From 1967 to 1975, devastating ‘restoration’ work was carried out with heavy tampering to the building’s forepart. In 1985 the municipality announced a ‘competition of ideas’ from which a modernist project (architect Adolfo Natalini) emerged, later modified eight/nine times over a period of fifteen years, in blatant contrast with the constraints safeguarding the adjacent Castel Sismondo and Poletti’s neoclassical work. In 2000, led by the Rimini città d’arte ‘Renata Tebaldi’ association, thousands of citizens mobilised, together with leading figures in national musical culture, to oppose the modernist plan and to philologically restore the historic theatre, an architectural jewel and an indispensable cultural instrument. In 2001, the turning point: the then undersecretary for Cultural Heritage, Vittorio Sgarbi, entrusted the Poletti Theatre to the Regional Superintendency of Emilia Romagna (arch. Elio Garzillo), which, with the advice of arch. Pier Luigi Cervellati, drew up (in 2004) a rigorous plan for the philological restoration of the Poletti Theatre, handed over free of charge to the municipality in 2005 and endorsed by the Ravaioli council. The cost of the restoration is estimated at 18.1 million euro. Mayor Ravaioli enthusiastically welcomed the State project in 2005, then prevaricated, and lost another four years. The mayor entrusts a municipal ‘design group’ with a further, more expensive project (29.7 million euro), presented in 2009. The municipal engineers brutally inserted pillars around the stalls, distorted the neoclassical hall to create 50 extra seats, raised a scenic tower and planned underground rooms 8 metres deep in an archaeological area with Roman remains. Rimini, city of art, publicly denounces the misdeed. The Superintendence rejected the distortion of the hall, which returned to the Polettian one, and the raising of the stage tower (2010), but allowed, trampling on legal restrictions, the two underground levels of 600 square metres each in the archaeological area below the stage and turned a blind eye to the encroachment into the restricted area (since 1915) of Castelsismondo. In this situation, in June 2011, the municipality goes to tender. While the Garzillo-Cervellati philological restoration project is adopted for the stage hall, the two underground levels have a violent impact on the archaeological area and raise the costs considerably. Work began in the spring of 2014, but stopped due to the bankruptcy of the contractor in July 2014. They resumed in November 2014 with CMB of Carpi. After four years, the work was completed and the reconstructed theatre, although not entirely philologically, was triumphantly inaugurated on 28 October 2018 with Rossini’s La Cenerentola (on Luigi Poletti’s birthday!). There was general acclaim, reiterated on 4 August 2019 on the occasion of Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro conducted by Riccardo Muti in the presence of the President of the Republic Sergio Mattarella. Subsequently, New York’s Times magazine placed Teatro Galli on its list of the 100 ‘World’s Greatest Places’ to visit. A great satisfaction for all those who have fought for years for its restoration, first and foremost the members of the ‘Renata Tebaldi’ Rimini City of Art Association!
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Church of Servi – Map – Piazzetta dei Servi – Rimini
The Church of the ‘Servi’, whose foundation dates back to 1317, stands in Corso d’Augusto in the homonymous Piazzetta dei Servi. At the beginning of the 14th century, the Malatesta family donated some properties within the city of Rimini to the Servants of Mary, who built a first chapel there. A few years later, the friars decided to expand their church by building a larger one, the side of which can be seen today along Corso d’Augusto. The church had a single nave, inside there were numerous altars and works of art, the apsidal area was characterised by three chapels with the central one being larger. The right side chapel had been built by the noble Agolanti family, to whom we owe the coat of arms in a pilaster on the side of the church, from the mid 14th century. Between 1774 and 1777, the church and the convent were renovated to the design of the Bolognese architect Gaetano Stegani (1678-1777); the Rimini-born Antonio Trentanove, a master of the Baroque, collaborated here as stucco and plasticist. In 1798, the Servite Order was suppressed and the convent passed to the Dominicans who had been removed from their convent in San Cataldo. The Dominicans brought numerous works of art from their previous location there, but their order was revoked in 1799. From 1806, the church became the parish of Santa Maria in Corte. In 1885, the parish priest Don Ugo Maccolini established the Pia Opera del Rosario and thanks to the funds collected from it, he was able to rebuild the façade of the church in 1894 to a design by engineer Giuseppe Urbani (1861-1937), rebuild the upper part of the bell tower and decorate the interior of the church with gilding by the Bolognese Luigi Samoggia. Sources and studies confirm that the church also contained 14th-century frescoes. Some of them were detached in the early 20th century to be displayed in the exhibition of the 14th century organised in Rimini in 1935. Some fragments were lost, while the one that was originally in the central apse is still preserved in the corridor of the former parish cloister. Traces of a fresco have also been found in the lower part of the bell tower.
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Church of St. Agostino – Map – Via Cairoli 32 – Rimini
Built in the 13th century in Romanesque-Gothic style, it is the oldest church in Rimini. It was dedicated to St John the Evangelist but, erected by the Hermits of St Augustine, it was always, for the people, the church of St Augustine. The first historical note we have of this church is a deed of gift dated 1069. At that time, it was a small oratory serving as a parish church with the title of St John the Evangelist. In 1256, the small building was entrusted to the order of Augustinian friars. At 55 metres high, the bell tower is the tallest in the city and for a long time also served as a lighthouse for Rimini’s sailors. Based on a design by a Venetian architect, it was erected on the right chapel of the church, which had already been frescoed in the first decades of the 14th century. It ends with a very high pyramidal spire. The importance of St Augustine’s is unquestionable, just think of the 14th century Rimini painting that can be said to have been born in the shadow of its bell tower. Giovanni da Rimini, in fact, considered the leader of the ‘fourteenth-century Rimini school’ lived in the district of San Giovanni Evangelista, and the Augustinians were the first to entrust this school with the execution of the frescoes in their large church built ex novo. The frescoes in the main chapel and those in the bell tower can be considered the most significant testimony, remaining in the city of Rimini, of the activity of the Giotto school. The frescoes came to light following the 1916 earthquake. It is a complex of frescoes depicting scenes from the life of the Saint and The Last Judgement attributable to the Master. The latter fresco (owned by the Diocese of Rimini), restored and removed from the attic, was originally placed in the Sala dell’Arengo, then moved to the city museum (Via L. Tonini).
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