With its launch on 21 June, the Ravenna Festival will bring live concerts back to Italy for the first time since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic.­ It will take place in compliance with governmental regulations on social distancing. Masks will be mandatory for all 250 members of the audience, and there will be a staggered access system.

As it is young artists whose livelihoods have been most severely threatened during the pandemic, the team behind the festival wanted to ensure that these young artists would be the first to be offered engagements to play. So the Luigi Cherubini Youth Orchestra, which was created by Riccardo Muti in 2004 as a training ground for young Italian professional musicians under the age of 30, will perform five different programmes this summer. ­

The 2021 Ravenna Festival is already in planning; it will be a celebration of Ravenna’s most famous honorary citizen – Dante Alighieri, who lived in Ravenna and died there in 1321.