<\/p>
As you face the main entrance of Rome\u2019s Teatro dell\u2019Opera, on its right side runs a street, Via Torino, where on the theatre\u2019s wall hangs a large, despondent laurel wreath.<\/strong><\/p> Many years of midday sun have bleached the colour from the foliage and the tricolore<\/i> ribbon attached to it. The wreath sits below a stone plaque which says (in Italian):<\/p> ‘In 1939 in this theatre, while rehearsing Puccini\u2019s Turandot<\/strong><\/a><\/em> in the role of Calaf, the tenor NICOLA UGO STAME was arrested for anti-fascism. For the courage of his ideas, after being tortured in Via Tasso, he was slaughtered with Nazi ferocity on the 24 March 1944 at the Ardeatine Caves’<\/p> There is so much to digest in this epitaph. But the first question is certainly this: who was this Nicola Stame, the rare tenor who not only played the hero but who was actually heroic?<\/p> Born in 1908, Nicola Stame \u2013 Ugo to his family and friends \u2013 grew up in Puglia, in the town of Foggia, birthplace of the composer Umberto Giordano. As the child of a single mother, his life was hard. Poverty was rife. At a time when bread cost 45 cents a kilo, a farm labourer might earn just one lira a day. Politics became riven between Mussolini\u2019s populist fascism and those who believed the solution to widespread poverty was socialism. Ugo reached adulthood during the early years of Mussolini\u2019s dictatorship, but he had no time for <\/i>Il Duce. <\/p> Today professional sport has become a golden ticket out of poverty and on to unimaginable wealth. In the first half of the 20th century, the prospects for an Italian tenor were equally rich. There was a huge demand not only in Italy itself but abroad \u2013 particularly in the US and South America with their vast populations of Italian immigrants \u2013 where Italian opera was so dominant that even German and French operas were commonly sung in Italian.<\/p> Like many other tenors who grew up in relative poverty \u2013 such as Enrico Caruso<\/a><\/strong> and Beniamino Gigli \u2013 Stame had little or no musical education. We don\u2019t know when and why he decided to pursue a precarious career in opera, but whatever long-term ambitions Ugo may have had were overwhelmed by the immediate need to earn a living; to take care of not only himself but his mother and his younger sister. So when he turned 18 he joined the Italian air force and learned to fly.<\/p>A childhood of poverty where music was a way out<\/h2>
A singing career beckons… after taking to the skies<\/h2>