He was born in Perugia, Italy in 1931. He studied at the Scuola di Scenotecnica e Regìa, Florence, under Alessandro Fersen and Gianni Vagnetti. From 1956 to 1961 he worked regularly with the festival Florence Maggio Musicale, the Teatro Carlo Felice in Genoa, the Modernist Festival of Bergamo, the festivals Arena di Verona and Sacred Music of Perugia, alongside renowned directors such as Luchino Visconti, Franco Zeffirelli, Giorgio Strehler, Giorgio De Loullo, Renato Castellani and Margarete Wallmann. He worked with La Scala Milan for the first time in 1963, when he directed the opera Falstaff. His USA debut was in Philadelphia, directing the opera The Puritans [I puritani], featuring Luciano Pavarotti and Joan Sutherland (1972). He directed more than 250 opera productions around the world, in opera houses in cities such as Berlin, Monaco, Edinburgh, Tokyo, Paris, Avignon, Barcelona, Madrid, etc. Since 1982 he collaborates with La Scala Milan as stage director and production manager. He wrote, inter alia, poetic texts for the operas The pit and the pendulum [Il pozzo e il pendolo] and Bruno Bettinelli’s Count down. He also designed the sets for many opera productions such as: Luigi Nono’s The Illuminated Factory [La fabbrica illuminata], Antonio Zanon’s The legend of Juliet [La leggenda di Giulietta], Lucia di Lammermoor and Tosca. He was an associate in Castellani’s television production of The life of Verdi [Vita di Verdi] and in Fellini's film And the Ship Sails On [E la nave va]. He was an ardent instructor of performing arts. For the GNO, he directed the opera The Barber of Seville [Il barbiere di Siviglia] (1966/67, 1967/68, 1968/69).