Verona

Ponte Pietra / Ponte Scaligero / River Adige / House and Tomb of Juliet / Giusti Gardens / Piazza delle Erbe / Piazza dei Signori / Church of San Zeno Maggiore / Castel San Zeno / Castel San Pietro / Arena / Borghetto di Valeggio sul Mincio

Florence

Villa Demidoff, Pratolino / Giambologna: L'Appenino / View from Bellosguardo / Uffizi / Palazzo Vecchio / Il supplizio di Savonarola / Palazzo Pitti / Torrigiani Garden / Piazzale Michelangelo

Villa Bonciani / Tchaikovsky's House / Villa Cora / Madame von Meck's House / Tchaikovsky's House at Klin in Russia

Florence by night

Bar Vinaio / Fattoria La Gialle / Mercato Nuovo

Naples

Harbour / Vesuvius / Castel dell'Ovo / Serapion (Pozzuoli) / Villa Comunale Park / Galleria Umberto / Piazza del Municipio / Museo Archeologico Nazionale / Castel Nuovo / Castel Sant'Elmo

Date of Production: 2010-06-02

Playing Time: 01:12:12

Catalogue Number: 2.110253

UPC: 747313525355

The Places

Our tour of Italy stars in Verona, with its reminiscences of Romeo and Juliet. It then goes to Florence, for some 300 years from 1434 the seat of the powerful Medici family, whose artistic patronage has left an impressive cultural legacy. The tour ends in the south with Naples, originally a Greek colony and later a Roman port. It then became the capital of a kingdom ruled first by Normans and later the Spanish. Briefly a Habsburg possession, from 1734 it belonged to the Bourbons until the unification of Italy in 1860.

The Music

Tchaikovsky stayed in Florence on two occasions in 1878, after the disaster of his marriage, hastily contracted, had led him to seek respite abroad. A visit to Rome in 1880 led to the composition of Capriccio Italien, and his opera The Queen of Spades, written in 1890 in Florence, was recalled in the same year in his Souvenir de Florence. The other music heard here is the Fantasy Overture from Romeo and Juliet, written in 1869 and based on Shakespeare's play, set in Verona.