During my last trip to Italy I saw posters advertising upcoming concerts in various cities, many of which were already out of date or sold out. When I’m at home, I know where to look to find out if the musicians I like are on tour so I can contemplate forking over the obscene ticket prices to see them perform. In Italy, however, I had no idea how to do that, other than look individually at every artist’s website. Well, I may have found the answer. It’s called Pollstar, and it’ll tell you all about concerts in Italy.
With Pollstar, you simply put the name of the city you’ll be visiting in the “For” box in the upper left-hand corner of the page. (If you’re visiting more than one city, you’ll need to do this search multiple times.) Type the city name in with its English spelling (Venice instead of Venezia, for instance), and don’t worry about trying to type Italy or anything in. Doing that just confuses the system. You’ll be able to choose the proper city from a list on the next page.
When you type, “Rome” into that box, for example, you get a list of possible matches – “Rome, ITA” being among them. If you’ve got a way to get to venues in nearby cities as well, there’s a box underneath where you choose the city which says, “Include surrounding cities” that you can check. Once you’ve selected that, you get a list of all the upcoming concerts in Rome – they’re listed with the date, the artist and the venue. You can narrow the date range to just the days you’ll be visiting, and filter the results by only the musical genres you’re interested in, too.
It’s very clever, and, I think, very useful for music lovers who are also travel lovers. Now you can check out a very different kind of travel experience if you want by seeing a favorite artist perform in front of an Italian crowd. Or you can catch a popular Italian musician in their “native environment.” Either way, it’s a great little website. And while seeing a concert in Italy may not be enough reason to book last minute flights to Rome, if you’re already there and looking for something a little non-traditional to do with your vacation time this could be a fun night out.
Here are just a few of the direct links to pages showing concerts in Italy:
Concerts in Rome
Concerts in Venice
Concerts in Florence
Concerts in Milan
Concerts in Naples
Concerts in Palermo
