Teatro San Carlo Naples: Mitridate Opens the 290th-Anniversary Season (Sept 24–Oct 1, 2026)

Mitridate opens a season built around the theatre's 290th anniversary — it was founded in 1737 and is generally reckoned the oldest continuously active opera house in the world — under new sovrintendente Fulvio Macciardi, who has framed the programme as a deliberate return to San Carlo's own identity. The season proper opens 2 December with a new production of Verdi's Luisa Miller, a work he composed specifically for this stage in 1849, directed by Davide Livermore and conducted by Daniel Oren. Across the year, the house is staging eleven opera titles and six ballet productions, including the return of a historic Madama Butterfly directed by Ferzan Özpetek and conducted by Francesco Ivan Ciampa, plus a recital from mezzo-soprano Anita Rachvelishvili and the comeback of Plácido Domingo to the San Carlo stage.

Further out, a new Aida debuting in February 2027 is set to travel to Tokyo and other Japanese cities that July — a scale of touring the theatre hasn't attempted in years, and a sign of how deliberately this anniversary run is being used to raise San Carlo's international profile ahead of its 300th birthday in 2037.

Book directly through teatrosancarlo.it, where seat maps show real-time availability, or in person at the Via San Carlo box office if you'd rather see the house before committing to a price tier. Dress code is smart-casual in practice rather than strict formalwear — plenty of visitors show up straight from a day of sightseeing — and it's worth arriving twenty minutes early regardless of the opera, since the gilded horseshoe auditorium itself, with its six tiers of boxes, is as much the draw as whatever is on stage. The theatre sits directly beside Piazza del Plebiscito and the Galleria Umberto I, so a performance pairs easily with an evening walk through the same stretch of the city before or after curtain.