Academia Musicale “Marino da Caramanico”

The Academia Musicale “Marino da Caramanico”, in line with the aims and purposes set out in its Statute, is mainly concerned with spreading “classical” musical culture among an ever wider public, both in number and in social background, and, not least, with promoting talented young musicians who intend to pursue a career as performers.

At a time when the value of things is measured by how concrete they are, musical expression, which is rooted in something transcendent, seems not to find sufficient recognition. Precisely to counter this idea and to reaffirm the importance of music as a cultural fact that elevates values and restores dignity to the individual, since 1987 the Academia has organised a series of artistic events held in Caramanico Terme, an urban community and spa tourist centre in the mountains of Abruzzo, using those places that history has preserved and selected as “artistic landmarks” of particular value for the wealth of cultural elements they contain and as a sign of human passage.

Caramanico Terme is by now known beyond regional and national borders for the splendid natural landscape that surrounds it and for its renowned thermal baths, but also and above all for the important work of artistic and cultural promotion carried out by this Academia, which is always closely followed by tourists and by the many people who stay in this renowned Abruzzo resort in the summer and beyond.

Thanks to the painstaking and meticulous planning of the artistic direction of the Academia della Musica “Marino da Caramanico”, the Orfento Valley Festival is organised during the year. It takes place at the San Domenico Auditorium, the Oratory of the Most Holy Trinity and the adjoining churchyard of Santa Maria Maggiore, the monumental complex of the Clarisse, the Capuchin Convent, squares and other architectural sites of considerable historical interest. The Festival is built around a series of initiatives spanning the various fields of art, from concerts, competitions, meetings and conferences on music and on violin-making to the staging of solo exhibitions of drawings, paintings and sculpture.

Artists of acknowledged accomplishment, all with “substantial” résumés and winners of important national and international competitions, now write continuously and send their proposals from Italy and from various European and non-European countries to the Artistic Direction of the Academia, confirming the prestige and renown that the Festival has by now achieved.

Throughout its history of some thirty years, the Academia has often found it difficult to guarantee the realisation of its initiatives because of the inevitable and chronic lack of funds that affects small and medium-sized associations in our region, that is, those that use the minimum of financial resources to carry out important events and activities, made possible by genuine voluntary work and which in most cases have little to envy of the activities of the so-called “large” associations, where the running costs alone often far exceed the purely artistic ones.

This Academia, like other significant musical organisations that have clearly and courageously chosen to pursue cultural policies of high artistic value, carried out with professionalism and genuine passion, hopes that in future its activity will be better safeguarded, in order to fully enhance Caramanico Terme from the tourism point of view and to definitively establish the prestigious Music Competition and the Concert Series at the highest international levels.