“Being a set designer requires two indispensable things: an eclectic and vast cultural background and knowledge of scene design techniques. These are two inseparable aspects that alone separately are not enough to make good work.
This is what Franco taught me.”
According to Carlo Centolavigna, set designer and lecturer at CIAS International Center for the Performing Arts “Franco Zeffirelli,” a good set designer is a curious eclectic, passionate about any artistic form that can express the soul of an era. Only on such fertile soil can fruitfully “take root” that technical knowledge that allows the set designer to design a set design “that works,” that does not betray the text, that goes along with it.
These are the principles that Carlo Centolavigna has learned in more than 35 years of career, many of them spent alongside Franco Zeffirelli, his master and mentor.
With Zeffirelli he had his first important opportunity at La Scala in 1983, where he was in charge of props for Turandot. He then followed him to Florence in 1985 for La Traviata at the Comunale with Cecilia Gasdia and on the set of Otello, his first experience in cinema, where he worked with Gianni Quaranta.
It was during the filming of Othello that Carlo Centolavigna was commissioned to organize Zeffirelli’s personal library and vast archive where records of his work, already at that time the fruit of more than 40 years of his career, are kept.
A little more than 2 years pass and Carlo Centolavigna is at the Met in New York for the 1987 staging of Turandot: “an enormous opportunity” for the young Centolavigna, who is in charge of the creation of the props and serves as Zeffirelli’s stage assistant.
Between 1988 and 1992 Centolavigna’s experiences at the Maestro’s side continued unabated: responsible for the sets of Aida at the Petruzzelli for the film Il Giovane Toscanini in 1988, he was then back at La Scala for Don Carlo in 1992 and assistant set designer in Storia di una Capinera in 1993.
In 1998 with Tokyo’s Aida he is with the Maestro as collaborating set designer and signs as set designer Un tè con Mussolini and Callas Forever in 2001 where he is in charge of the sets for Carmen. He is alongside the Maestro as a collaborator for the latest version of Traviata at the Arena di Verona in June 2019.
Parallel to his professional relationship with Zeffirelli, he established himself as an independent set designer in his first Traviata and in the 1990 Elisir d’Amore and signed the sets created with Maestro Giancarlo del Monaco in major theaters in Italy and around the world including “Andrea Chénier” at the Opera Bastille in Paris and Madrid, Francesca da Rimini in Zurich and Paris, and Simon Boccanegra in Zurich.