"1959 is an important year because the Festival is announced with a progressive number, 2nd Festival dei Due Mondi. This is a sign, uncertain as it may be, of the will to move forward on the momentum of the previous year's success." So wrote Sandro Morichelli and Gianni Toscano in 1987. The latter had been the communist mayor who in 1958 had launched the event by welcoming to open arms the "Americans" following Gian Carlo Menotti. The second Spoleto Festival was prepared against the backdrop of a city in which the need for and the first signs of profound change were being felt both economically and infrastructurally. Along with the experimentation of new performance formulas such as _Album Leaves _directed by Steven Vinaver and Fogli d´Album directed from Franco Zeffirelli, there is a pressing need for new spaces from to be used for theater, for exhibitions as well as for stagecraft workshops and for the offices in charge of organization. Just as one begins to to talk about converting the Albornoz Fortress for cultural purposes as well. "1959 is also the year of the invention of the Concert in the Piazza del Duomo," writes Maurizio Modugno, "We do not know to who it is due to: perhaps Schippers himself may have borrowed the idea from Tanglewood, from Ravinia, from the evenings at Lewisohn Stadium or in Aix-en-Provence. What is certain is that it immediately becomes an event of resounding musical and personal appeal for Tommy and for Spoleto."

On the occasion of the sixty-first edition of Festival dei Due Mondi, continuing a project initiated for the sixtieth edition, through a conference, a book, and an exhibition, extraordinary moments in the city´s history are traced in order to reread the origins of the event, understand its legacy in the present, and trace future scenarios.