MOST PEOPLE are familiar with the refrains of the opera ‘Cavalleria Rusticana’, often without realising how or why. 

Pietro Mascagni’s infamous intermezzo is the score used in the closing scenes of The Godfather Part III, where Michael Corleone’s son makes his stage debut singing Turiddu at Palermo’s Teatro Massimo. Coppola’s choice was specific: Giovanni Verga’s story of love, jealousy and a fatal duel in a village square condenses Sicily’s codes of honour into a single act of verismo drama. Dolce & Gabbana evidently agree. For their latest Alta Sartoria show, the designers turned Taormina’s Teatro Antico into a stage for the 1890 opera itself.

Like all good dramas, the show began at sunset, with Mount Etna darkening on one side of the amphitheatre, candlelight climbing the upper tiers. Below, the stage filled with a late 19th-century piazza: farmers, fishermen, cart drivers, shepherds and nobles, the full social order of Verga’s Sicily occupying the same space. 

Then came the clothes. Models emerged – but rather than dressing like the characters, they were attired as the opera’s imagined audience: men arriving for an opening night in black tie, opera cloaks and polished riding boots, lapels weighted with medallions and enough gold bullion embroidery to outfit a naval academy. 

For anyone who has lamented the lack of theatrics in men’s fashion, the spectacle that Dolce & Gabbana delivered should more than scratch that itch. Fashion has always been as much a performance of the clothes as their function. What came out was a Tony Award-level one.

The tailoring was degrees softer than the house’s signature structure and sharpness: jackets draped with asymmetric sashes or replaced altogether by jewelled silk pyjama shirts, trousers pleated and cut with a deep, generous break. There were still a few signature muscle tees (because of course), printed with the Sicilian landscape or trompe l’oeil chains, punctured any risk of the collection reading as costume drama.

None of this is out of character. Dolce & Gabbana have spent four decades giving us the very definition of Italianità. Domenico Dolce grew up in a small town outside Palermo, and Sicily has functioned as the house’s founding text. From the black-and-white campaigns of the early years to the Alta events that have now toured the island’s grand addresses for 14 years. 

The vocabulary draws on Catholic and the classical world in equal measure: saints’ medallions and widow’s black on one hand, gilded excess worthy of a Roman triumph on the other. The Teatro Antico held both comfortably. Built by Greeks, enlarged by Romans, and host, by evening’s end, a funeral procession that tracked the plot of ‘Cavalleria Rusticana’ to its end, when Turiddu dies in his duel. 

The gloom was fleeting, though. Once the clergy had led mourning townspeople across the stage the designers appeared for their bow, the fourth wall came down, and roughly 100 models stepped off the stage to pose for photographs with guests. Some were happy enough to put recent rivalries aside and head straight for Norwegian soccer player Erling Haaland in the front row.

Così fan tutti.

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