The Spoleto Festival 2008, known as Festival of the two Worlds, is organized every year between the end of June and mid-July in the heart of Umbria.

After that in 1958 Gian Carlo Menotti inaugurates the first edition, the Spoleto Festival becomes, year after year, a center of big interest for the performances of dance, prose and lyrics.
The fact that the Maestro Menotti chooses personally the artists among the most talented professionals of the sector but also among the most promising young talents, has made of the Festival of the two Worlds an inexhaustible font of great professionals of the world of spectacle.
The Spoleto Festival 2008, with the president artistic director Francis Menotti, is nowadays a worldwide attraction that gives an international image and fame to the Umbrian city; therefore it is important to remember the period during which the italo-American composer, already from 1956, is looking for an Italian city having the possibility and the characteristics to welcome the musical festival he wants to realize.
The artists chooses Spoleto, one says in alternative to Todi, convinced by the stenographic spaces at disposal: the XVIIth century theater Caio Melisso (at that time dedicated to cinema and which perfect acoustics was recovered at the expenses of the composer), the big XIX century new theater, the open air Roman theater and the very suggestive spaces such as the Cathedral Square, where the final concerts of the Festival of the two Worlds have always been organized. After the performance of 1958 of the Mac Beth of Verdi, conducted by Thomas Schippers for the production of Luchino Visconti, Spoleto is applauded as the new Italian Salzburg, and during the following years the Festival of the two Worlds welcomes very famous persons such as, just to cite some of them, Wally Toscanini, Franco Zeffirelli, Patroni Griffi, Mario Soldati, Dino Buzzati, Indro Montanelli, Pablo Neruda, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Salvatore Quasimodo, Ezra Pound, Eugenj Evtuschenko, Luca Ronconi, Al Pacino and Mariangela Melato.