He was born in Milan in 1934. He studied pharmaceutics at the University of Pavia and acting at the National Academy of Dramatic Art in Milan, graduating in 1952. Immediately thereafter, he made his acting debut as an actor in Alphonse Daudet’s play L’Arlésienne (directed by Franco Enriquez), and collaborated with filmmakers Tatiana Pavlova, Giorgio Albertazzi and Sandro Bolchi. After a brief career as an actor and solo opera singer, he worked as assistant director alongside Attilio Colonello and Mauro Bolognini. The first performance he directed was the opera Madama Batterfly at the Teatro Sociale of Como, in 1967. Since then, he directed approximately 700 productions of more than 130 operas, staged both in Italy and internationally. He collaborated with leading soloists of the postwar era. Beyond Italy, he directed performances in Chicago, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, Salzburg, Buenos Aires, Santiago, Tokyo, Seoul, Brussels, Montpellier, Monte Carlo, Munich, Lisbon, Istanbul, Barcelona, Madrid and Seville. In 1996, he directed Fedora at the Metropolitan Opera of New York, starring Plácido Domingo, Mirella Freni. He worked with the Italian Radio (RAI) and, in 1990, he collaborated with director Francis Ford Coppola in the third part of the film trilogy The Godfather. He has received the awards “La Noce d’Oro” (1970), “Verdi d’Oro,” “Luigi Illica” (1987) and “Flaviano Labò” (2005). He has written the libretto for Franco Mannino’s opera The Picture of Dorian Gray. For the GNO, he directed the first GNO presentation of the opera The Sleepwalker [La sonnambula] (Olympia Theater, 1969-70, 1970-71, 1977-78, 1978-79).