Rossini Opera Festival

Held each August in Rossini's birthplace, this festival, founded in 1980, exists to revive the composer's rarely performed operas using critical editions prepared by the Fondazione Rossini. Performances run across venues including the historic Teatro Rossini and the larger Vitrifrigo Arena, and many restored works have received their modern-era world premieres here before reaching other opera houses.

Pesaro, the birthplace of Gioachino Rossini in 1792, has hosted the Rossini Opera Festival since 1980, when the municipality established the event on a proposal by Gianfranco Mariotti specifically to give theatrical life to the scholarly work of the Fondazione Rossini, which had been preparing critical editions of Rossini's full output, including operas that had gone unperformed for a century or more after his death.