Castrato Phantoms: Moreschi, Fellini, and the Sacred Vernacular in Rome

A new mapping of castrato afterlives in modern Rome

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Published:
Mar 3, 2026
2026
Illus:
10 color + 142 b/w illus.
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Around 1830, opera houses stopped using castrati, and Rome and the Vatican became home to their glorious singing, engineered by surgery and intensive vocal training. Castrati were long mired in secrecy, obfuscations, and lies about their origin and conditions, not least the last of them, Alessandro Moreschi. Musicologist Martha Feldman declines to accept these deep-seated mysteries and concealments. After a decade and more of digging through archives and family histories comes her exciting transdisciplinary and quasi-cinematic account of Moreschi, whose recordings preserve the only sonic trace of a solo castrato.

Yet Moreschi鈥檚 story extends far beyond him. It opens up intrigues, politics, and histories of the Vatican, everyday histories of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Rome, the world of Roman opera, the city鈥檚 unique m茅lange of sacred and vernacular tropes, and representations of Rome by iconic film director Federico Fellini. Moreschi and Fellini turn out to have been related by marriage, but also to share synergies grounded in Rome鈥檚 persistent inclination to vernacularize the sacred. Far from telling of one anomalous figure, Feldman鈥檚 gripping history convinces readers that Moreschi, like Fellini, can be read as an improbable index of Roman consciousness, both during his own life and well beyond.