PESARO REPORTS TRIUMPHANT CULTURE YEAR
As the art town of Pesaro (Marche) passes the baton on to Agrigento (Sicily), elected the new 2025 Italian Capital of Culture, Pesaro administrative council presented a positive balance of the initiatives organized last year, asserting that the initiative had not only stimulated the town to create new cultural attractions, but had boosted tourism.
Pesaro, the birthplace of the father of Italian opera Gioacchino Rossini, has staged a popular annual Rossini Festival since 1980, but its many other attractions were little known to the general public. The Year of Italian Capital of Culture, however, provided a stimulus to include Pesaro on the tourist map and involved the entire surrounding territory with 50 provincial towns participating actively.
The town organized over a thousand events, bringing visitor figures up by 30% in low season and doubling the number of museum visitors, thanks also to a series of stimulating art exhibitions and installations, the promotion of existing but little known treasures, such as Villa Americi, an 18th century architectural jewel and seat of the Rossini conservatory, with the botanical Garden of Santa Maria in Fiori e Pianti and the historic Oliveiano Library, which contains the only known signed drawing by Raphael.
The image chosen to represent the Pesaro Cultural Year was the Ginkgo Biloba tree, which survived the Hiroshima atomic bombing in 1945 and has since become known as the Tree of Peace. In 2021 a Ginkgo seedling obtained from the Green Legacy Hiroshima group was planted as a symbol of peace and hope in the Pesaro Mirafiori public park.
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Info: Tel. 0039.0721387655 www.comune.pesaro.pu.it www.rossinioperafestival.it
