Below is Sappho by French painter Charles Mengin in 1877. It pretty much captures her racy reputation throughout the 19th century. Although it was said that Sappho wrote love poems to her female students, this painting chooses to illustrate a story that said she threw herself into the sea when

Cabarets developed on two tracks: clubs and music halls and they were different. But, first they had to move inside. Les Hydropathes, founded in 1878 in the Latin Quarter, was short-lived but it was so named because its hosts professed to hate water and so had to drink wine or

There was a sense of theatricality about bohemian life in Europe's cities in the late 19th century. At a time when imperialism was revolutionizing the arts, it seemed that writing and composing were not enough—one had to be larger than life to get attention. Lola Montez’s

After being banned in China, director Zhang Yimou staged the opera at the Teatro Comunale in Florence in 1997 (with Zubin Mehta) and subsequently outdoors at the Forbidden City in Beijing in 1998. This set up the wonderfully curious situation of a Western fantasy set in imperial China being staged

Viareggio is a beach town in Tuscany famous for its carnivals. Puccini was born in the nearby city of Lucca. He particularly loved the area around the village of Torre del Lago, and Lake Massaciuccoli, a wetlands area shown above, between Viareggio and Lucca. He moved there in 1921, composed