Lakescapes – Diffused Theatre of Lake Maggiore

Theatre that steps out of the theatre

Founded in 2015, Lakescapes – Diffused Theatre of Lake Maggiore is one of the most original cultural festivals in the Piedmontese landscape. The idea is simple yet powerful: to take theatre out of traditional venues and scatter it across the most evocative locations in the area, turning villages, historic villas, lakefronts, and civic landmarks into diffused stages. The project is led by the Accademia dei Folli, a historic music-theatre company from Turin, under the artistic direction of Carlo Roncaglia.

A network of seven lakeside municipalities

The 2026 edition, the twelfth, features eighteen events distributed between May and November across seven municipalities of Lake Maggiore: Briga Novarese, Colazza, Dormelletto, Lesa, Meina, Mergozzo, and Sesto Calende. The festival is much more than a performance schedule: it is a cultural network that creates a dialogue between local administrations, tourism operators, and the community, enhancing the landscape and historical heritage of the lake's Piedmontese shore. Alongside prose, the program includes music-theatre, itinerant white nights in the villages, a special event, and a series of lecture-performances on the history of theatre.

Lakescapes in Lesa

In the municipality of Lesa, in the province of Novara, the heart of the festival is the Società Operaia, a historic venue that has welcomed the festival's most loyal audience for years. It is from Lesa that the entire twelfth season kicks off on May 24, 2026, with Madame Bovary, Flaubert's masterpiece revisited in the company's "classics reloaded" style. The season then concludes, again at the Società Operaia in Lesa, on November 28 with Faust.a, one of the 2026 new productions by Accademia dei Folli written by Tiziano Scarpa.

Between revisited classics and new productions

The stylistic hallmark of Lakescapes is popular yet sophisticated theatre, capable of speaking to a wide audience without compromising on quality. The program alternates between great literary classics reinterpreted with irony and contemporary language, performances that weave live music and storytelling, and original creations presented as premieres right on Lake Maggiore. In Lesa, the Società Operaia thus becomes the place where the opening and closing of the season take on an almost ritual value for the lake's spectators.

Why it's worth it

• Performances in the historic Società Operaia of Lesa, just a few steps from Lake Maggiore
• The inauguration and closing of the entire 2026 season hosted in Lesa
• An immersive diffused theatre formula that enhances local landmarks
• Directed by a company with over twenty years of experience in music-theatre

Lakescapes in Lesa is the ideal opportunity to combine a high-quality theatre evening with a trip to the Piedmontese shore of Lake Maggiore, discovering the municipality in an unusual and fascinating cultural light.