Calling all Puccini lovers. It’s time to make a pilgrimage to Lucca to experience the 53rd annual Puccini Opera Festival, to experience opera as the master himself wanted to hear it. Started in 1930, following a 1924 letter from Puccini exclaiming his wish to hear his opera in the “open-”air,” the Puccini Opera Festival attracts 40,000 opera lovers a year to hear the music they lave in Lucca’s open-air theater just steps from where Puccini lived, worked and is buried.

This year’s festival is going on now, through August 16, with shows of Puccini’s greats, from Tosca to La Boheme. Puccini and beautiful Lucca. It doesn’t get much better than that.

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