Arrigo Boito

It was certainly thanks to Verdi that Montecatini saw the presence of another illustrious guest: Arrigo Boito (Padua, 24 February 1842 – Milan, 10 June 1918).

Patriotic and unruly, Boito was a literary genius without equal in the melodrama of the Italian nineteenth century.

Despite having had fame and success, he suffered from not possessing the gift of a composer to produce his own works on the librettos that he knew how to write with unparalleled skill.

In 1863 he had come into conflict with Verdi for having published Ode all’arte italiana clearly hostile to the Maestro. The reconciliation between the two occurred almost twenty years later and the return of Arrigo Boito to the Maestro’s entourage contributed to recreating that intense collaboration that between 1884 and 1889 gave birth to the masterpiece Otello e il Falstaff in the rooms of the Locanda Maggiore.

When one of the two was in Montecatini and the other in Milan they exchanged a dense correspondence delving into the psychology of Otello which was proving to be complex, but in October 1884, locked in his room at the Locanda Maggiore composing, Verdi, exulting, wrote to Boito: "I have finally finished the fourth act".
And to arrange the scores of the orchestration, Arrigo Boito also decided to come to the Bagni di Montecatini, loaded with papers and scores, determined to work with Verdi to fine-tune the work brought up to that point.

Five years later, in the month of July 1889, Verdi, as soon as he received the first idea of ​​Falstaff from Boito, Verdi wrote to him from the Locanda Maggiore: "... now I can only repeat that it could not be done better than what you have done".

And again at the Locanda Maggiore the genius from Busseto, working three hours a day locked in his rooms, will draft the libretto of Falstaff.