Only a few days remain before the opening of the 52nd Festival della Valle d’Itria (14 July – 2 August 2026), and, as every year, In Orbita will herald its arrival. The free program that precedes the Festival from 10 July to 12 July, takes music beyond its customary venues, bringing it into rural districts, villas, and community spaces of Martina Franca, while anticipating some of the themes and trajectories that will shape the 2026 edition.
This year, the first stop is Naufragi, which will be staged on 10 July in Contrada San Paolo and on 11 July at the Villaggio del Fanciullo in Martina Franca. It would be difficult to imagine a more fitting beginning for this year’s theme: the Mediterranean, cradle of myth, crossroads of cultures, and a sea that welcomes.
Freely inspired by Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Naufragi intertwines theatre with Bach’s Goldberg Variations, performed by the String Trio of the Arturo Toscanini Philharmonic Orchestra, and builds around the music a reflection on travel, crossing, real and metaphorical shipwrecks, and the meaning of being a community.
Yet Naufragi is also something more than a performance, and it deserves to be told from close up.
Created in 2025 within the Parma Prison Institutes as part of the Community Music programme of the Arturo Toscanini Foundation, the project arrives in Puglia for the first time and does so in the form that is most intrinsic to its nature: that of an open creative process that changes each time together with the people it encounters.
Indeed, Naufragi rewrites itself at every stage of its journey. The people involved change, the stories change, and so do the texts that become part of the performance. The dramaturgy intentionally leaves spaces open so that new voices can inhabit and transform it, according to the principles of community theatre that lie at the heart of the project.
This time, the texts of Naufragi belong to a community from Puglia.
Alongside the actors of the Anellodebole company and the musicians of the Arturo Toscanini Philharmonic Orchestra, twelve refugees and asylum seekers hosted by the Oasi 2 Community of Trani will take to the stage, together with the children of the “S. Paolo” primary school and the young people of the Villaggio del Fanciullo in Martina Franca. Their words, gathered during the workshops preceding the performances, will enter the dramaturgy and become an integral part of it.
This is one of the project’s most distinctive features: the human material from which the performance emerges is never the same. Every new community leaves a trace, adds a story, and alters the journey. The version premiering in Martina Franca is therefore, in every respect, a world premiere, built upon the stories and experiences collected throughout the Apulian territory.
Even before the curtain rises on the Festival’s operas, the Mediterranean of 2026 already takes shape through the voices of those who cross it, inhabit it, or imagine it: not as a border, but as a space of encounter, exchange, and listening.
Bringing In Orbita to a close will be In Quartetto all’opera, on 12 July at Villa del Carmine: a recital by Francesco Libetta together with the students of the Paolo Grassi Foundation — Christian De Nicolais, Simone Mao, and Giovanni Mascia — in a programme exploring the possibilities of a single piano capable of becoming an orchestra, from two up to eight hands.
The Festival has yet to begin, but its journey is already underway.
