Spoleto Culture

The Festival dei Due Mondi

This is what Spoleto is for, eleven months of the year as well as the one. Gian Carlo Menotti confirmed Spoleto as the Festival's seat in 1956 and the first edition opened on 5 June 1958. The 2026 edition is the 69th, from 26 June to 12 July.

The roll of what has happened here is the argument: the Verdi Requiem staged in the cathedral square in 1959; the world première of Luca Ronconi's Orlando Furioso in 1969; Visconti's Manon Lescaut in 1973; the Roman theatre brought into the Festival on 5 July 1974; the Rocca Albornoziana used for performance from 1982. An American sister festival opened in Charleston in 1977, and another ran in Australia from 1986. The box office is on +39 0743 69080.

Painting and the Duomo

The cathedral, reconsecrated by Pope Innocent III in 1198, is the town's masterpiece: a mosaic façade, a row of rose windows, and inside, frescoes with contributions from Filippo Lippi and his workshop. Lippi died in Spoleto and is buried in the cathedral.

The Lombard inheritance

San Salvatore, built between the late 4th and early 5th centuries, was inscribed by UNESCO in 2011 as part of Longobards in Italy: Places of Power (568–774 A.D.). It is a late-Roman building that a Germanic kingdom took over rather than replaced, and it is the physical evidence for Spoleto's three centuries as a ducal capital. The Museo Nazionale del Ducato in the Rocca is where the rest of that story is kept, at Piazza Bernardino Campello 1.

Modern art

Palazzo Collicola holds the modern and contemporary collection, open Wednesday to Monday, 10:30 to 13:00 and 14:30 to 18:00. The Festival brought sculptors as well as musicians here, and the town kept the work.

The table

Spoleto is strangozzi country — a hand-rolled pasta — and black-truffle country, at the edge of the Valnerina.