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Social control and the censorship of Giuseppe Verdi's operas in Rome (1844–1859)

In the 1840s and 1850s, four operas by Giuseppe Verdi (I due Foscari, La battaglia di Legnano, Il trovatore, and Un ballo in maschera) premiered at the theaters Argentina and Apollo in Rome. Two of these works (I due Foscari and Un ballo in maschera) had been rejected at other theaters because the authorities did not consider them concordant with the censorial requirements, and none of the four would have been permitted in Rome had the authorities applied the usual criteria. That they accepted them anyway suggests the process of censorship did not follow strict rules but was handled arbitrarily. These premieres are even more astonishing when we take into account that Rome, in contrast to most other cities on the peninsula, had very rigorous standards of censorship.