Maggio Musicale Fiorentino is synonymous with proposal, innovation, internationality, and an interdisciplinary vision of music and performance, concerts and exhibitions, opera and seminars. In two words: of living culture. Founded in 1928 as the Stabile Orchestrale Fiorentina, in 1933 it gave life to the oldest Music festival in Italy, the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, hence its name. Starting with its orchestra, it emphasized the values of the grand international music culture while suggesting, at the same time, new directions regarding both its repertoire and its general vision of a performance, with melodrama present to an extent that was perhaps unprecedented in Italy. For decades the greatest names in music performance have appeared at the Maggio Musocale Fiorentino, in an ever-increasing connection between the Festival itself and all the other activities that take place throughout the year in historical theaters as well as in the Opera di Firenze, the newly-built opera house of Florence.