Opera at the Baths

Sixteen hundred years ago no proper Roman's day was complete without a visit to the public baths, and a favorite was the great new one built by Emperor Caracalla below the Aventine Hill. Tunics and togas checked, the patrons could idle away hours beside the marble pools, move leisurely from the steamy heat of the calidarium to the cool waters of the frigidarium, let slaves massage them with perfumed oils while they pondered politics, poetry and philosophy.

For the past two months, as they have each summer since the war, modern Romans and visitors have been swarming out to the Baths of Caracalla, but for a different reason. Three hundred and fifty thousand strong, they have gone to the majestic reddish brick ruins to see Rome's summer opera, one of the most dazzling sights, if not sounds, in the world.

Mob on the Stage. Flanked on either side by huge towers of brickwork that once formed the walls of the calidarium, Caracalla's is one of the world's biggest opera stages: more than a third of an acre. To keep it from looking empty, the Rome Opera summons a mob of supers that even Hollywood would admit was colossal. Ten horses, three elephants and a camel usually turn up onstage for Aida. In this season's Lohengrin, 700 performers (and Benito Mussolini's favorite white horse) were onstage at once.

There are seats to match. When Mussolini started summer opera at the baths in 1937, he ordered a theater for 20,000, was seldom able to fill it. At war's end, Romans reduced the seating capacity to 10,000 so that back-row listeners could have a chance to hear.

Hair on the Chest. Singing so that back-row listeners could actually heaf was another problem. But this season plenty of top-rankers were on hand to try. On the nights when the Metropolitan Opera's Ferruccio Tagliavini sang Tosca and Lucia di Lammermoor, there were few empty seats; fans gladly paid double prices to hear once-barred (for alleged collaboration) Tenor Beniamino Gigli sing the operatic twins "Cav" and "Pag" (Cavalleria Rusticana and I Pagliacci) with popular Soprano Maria Caniglia and Baritone Tito Gobbi. Even 60-year-old Tenor Tito Schipa was on hand.

Last week, with a robustious performance of Rigoletto, the Rome Opera's 1949 summer season came to a close. Many of the 200,000 tourists who visited Caracalla found performances full of more swaggering and hair-on-the-chest acting than they were accustomed to; also, the vast distances sometimes provoked more screaming than singing by Caracalla's puffing stars. But most could agree that they had never seen such a striking setting or such magnificent staging.

Rome's opera lovers, reviewing progress since the war, and eyeing their arch operatic enemies in Milan, were delighted. Said one: "We are at least improving artistically while La Scala is living largely on its reputation."

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