“Thoroughly and rigorously researched and at the same time beautifully written, Networking Operatic Italy is a must-read for scholars and teachers in musicology, opera studies, Italian studies, and media studies. Francesca Vella deftly negotiates media theory and historical context, including reception theory, with refined and elegant readings of her musical texts. Her chapters on Verdi’s Aida and on military bands are a model for interdisciplinary research in the humanities.”

Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg, Brown University

“Vella breaks with the idea that nineteenth-century Italians were obsessed with their own culture and traditions and the narrow boundaries of their local communities. Networking Operatic Italy presents a new chapter in musicological research, introducing mobility studies into the history of opera and offering fascinating new interpretations of Italians’ engagement with music and theater. This is a book of great erudition and imaginative power.”

Axel Körner, University College London

“Networking Operatic Italy is an innovative and exciting exploration of opera on the move in mid-nineteenth-century Italy at the crucial time of national unification. Vella asks what these travels meant not only for opera, but also for a nation in the making. Her imaginative and comprehensive answers make for a compelling, multifaceted, and wholly original book.”

Emanuele Senici, University of Rome La Sapienza

“Astutely researched, Networking Operatic Italy weaves together an impressive array of recent humanistic trends. Tending to the local and the global, to mobility, materiality, temporality, technologies, media, and the voice, its case studies offer a unique journey through Italy’s rich operatic cultures in the decades around Unification. Vella thus manages to reframe the seemingly well-traveled world of later nineteenth-century Italian opera in view of its networked affordances, contingencies, and (often conflicting) modernizing impulses.”

Gundula Kreuzer, Yale University

"By contextualizing operatic practices within a wide arrange of theoretical, textual, visual, and sonic sources, the book delivers an innovative look at operatic culture in the context of Italy’s national formation and the Risorgimento. It is a fresh approach to mobility and transnational studies, one that makes the connection between a 'locality' such as Piacenza, commensurably relevant vis-à-vis the globality of Milan or Venice. For the rigor and originality of its primary sources, for the brilliancy and clarity of its argument, and for the refinement and elegance of its eloquence, Networking Operatic Italy is worthy of praise."

AAIS Book Prize

"In this enticing monograph, artists and operas travel the globe, technologies evolve and malfunction, and literary, archival, and musical sources are put in dialogue in innovative ways . . . The historical exploration Vella undertakes is markedly interdisciplinary. She ties and unties knots between the disciplines of literature, media studies, histories of technology, and musicology in new and unexpected ways. Her impressive synthesis reveals a fascinating tapestry of Italian culture, while inviting further research on the twists and tangles of operatic history."

Music and Letters

"Francesca Vella’s groundbreaking debut monograph Networking Operatic Italy will certainly not go unnoticed across a wide spectrum of disciplines such as opera studies, reception, and performance studies. The author’s refreshing outlook and compelling prose contribute to making the text a must-read for any serious investigation of nineteenth-century Italian culture."

Sound Stage Screen

"Elegantly written and thoroughly researched, Networking Operatic Italy presents Italian opera as the primary lens through which to examine the role of technology in the (re)production and circulation of cultural products and ideas in the mid-nineteenth century. Although operatic examples and references abound throughout the book, what truly binds the chapters together is the author's persistent interest in the material side of the tools that allowed for the reverberation of Italian opera in time and space. . . . Networking Operatic Italy is notable. . . for the originality of its method, whose ramifications directly connect opera studies with the philosophy of history."

Notes: Quarterly Journal of the Music Library Association

"In this persuasive and multifaceted study, Vella provides a compelling examination of the convergence of Italian opera and technology, focusing on the intersection of local, national, and international operatic networks
in the decades surrounding Italian Unification. In so doing, Vella harnesses an impressive array of recent scholarly trends, engaging interdisciplinary discourses surrounding mobility, materiality, technology, temporality, and voice in crafting an innovative and nuanced study of Italian opera’s production and circulation."

Opera Quarterly