Where did Giuseppe Verdi grow up and live?

📍Via Verdi 10, 43011 Roncole Verdi, Parma, Italy

1813 – 1901

“I was born on the 10th of October 1813 in Le Roncole, a village in the Duchy of Parma, the son of an innkeeper. The Parma countryside — flat, agricultural, the Po Valley stretching to the horizon — was my first landscape, and the local church was where I first heard an organ and understood what sound could do to a room full of people. I went to study music in Busseto and then attempted to enter the Milan Conservatory, which rejected me as too old at eighteen. I returned to Busseto, married, had children, and suffered the deaths of both my children and my wife within two years. The operas that followed — Nabucco, Rigoletto, La Traviata, Otello, Falstaff — came from a man who knew what grief and resilience meant from the inside.”

👍 LovedThe Po Valley landscape and its particular flatness that gives the sky enormous presence. The local church music that was my first education. The Busseto community that supported a young musician of obvious talent.

👎 DislikedThe deaths of my children and my first wife within two years — losses from which I never fully recovered. The Milan Conservatory's rejection. The Italian political situation that made Nabucco simultaneously a religious and a nationalist statement.

Map showing where Giuseppe Verdi lived — Via Verdi 10, 43011 Roncole Verdi, Parma, Italy

🗺️ Approximate location today

📷 Location image · via Wikimedia Commons

Sources: Phillips-Matz, M. Verdi: A Biography (1993), Oxford University Press; Budden, J. Verdi (1985), Dent