The story
Split Summer Festival in Split
The Split Summer Festival, founded in 1954, stages open-air opera, theatre, jazz, classical music, and dance across roughly thirty days each mid-July to mid-August, with the Peristyle, the central courtyard of Diocletian's Roman palace built around 305 AD, as its principal venue. Held over roughly thirty days each summer, the programme extends into other historic squares across the old town as well.
The Peristyle, the central courtyard of the Roman emperor Diocletian's retirement palace, built around 305 AD, has served as the Split Summer Festival's principal open-air stage since the festival's founding in 1954, when the city, then part of socialist Yugoslavia, rebuilt its cultural life around the idea of staging professional opera, theatre, and music in a space that was both free to use and inherently spectacular.