Fondazione Arena di Verona in Mumbai and Bangkok
After the success of Turandot in Seoul, the Fondazione Arena di Verona is again on tour in India and Thailand.
A new Route to the East for Opera and Italian Opera Singing, a World Heritage Site. A few weeks after the success of Turandot in Seoul, the Fondazione Arena continues on the Asian route as the standard-bearer of Made in Italy. And it lands for the very first time in India, in Mumbai, before continuing on to Bangkok, in Thailand.
Tomorrow, Tuesday 12 November, at the Royal Opera House in Mumbai, sopranos Eleonora Bellocci and Caterina Marchesini, tenor Galeano Salas and baritone Giulio Mastrototaro, accompanied at the piano by Fondazione Arena's Superintendent Cecilia Gasdia, will perform the most beautiful arias by Verdi and Puccini. A ‘taste’ of the 2025 Arena Festival for an audience of stakeholders interested in one of the Made in Italy products par excellence: opera. Partners of the event are the Mumbai offices of the Italian Consulate, Enit Italia and the Italian Cultural Institute, as well as the Veneto Region. Bauli, a Group that already supports the Arena with the 67 Colonne fundraising project, will also be present in India with an office in Baramati.
On Thursday 14 November, Fondazione Arena will move to the Yamaha Music Hall in Bangkok to present the 102nd Arena di Verona Opera Festival to the Thai audience. The event is realised with the Italian Embassy in Bangkok and the Veneto Region, and the support of the Italian and Thai Muaythai federations, which next year will see Verona as the capital of the sport and venue of the most important Muaythai event in the world.
The promotional activities of the Fondazione Arena di Verona, which in recent years have focused on the USA and Northern Europe, are also intensifying in Eastern countries, which are registering an increase in tourist flows to our country.
The latest report by the Indian Chamber of Commerce in Italy, for example, shows how Indian tourism to our country, made up of ‘high-spending’ people, after peaking in 2023, recorded a 29% increase in summer overnight stays already in the first months of 2024.
Thailand's tourist presence is also now mature, as witnessed by the data released by the Italian Economic Observatory, which underlines how Italy, and in particular its cities of art, are an increasingly popular destination not only for the middle and upper classes of Thai society but also for the so-called ‘incentive groups’, i.e. the prize trips organised by important companies, such as banks, insurance companies and industrial groups, for their employees or stakeholders, who increasingly choose Italy as their preferred destination.
