The 2026 Winter Olympics paid homage to icons of Italian art history during its opening ceremony in Milan, Italy, on February 6th. The ceremony, which was held at Milan’s San Siro stadium, was helmed by creative director Marco Balich and featured tributes to great Italian artists including Leonardo da Vinci, Antonio Canova, Dante Alighieri, and more. The evening’s theme was armonia, the Italian word for harmony, and celebrated the country’s innumerable cultural outputs.
The performance opened with a pair of ballet dancers from Milan’s famed Teatro alla Scala dressed as the mythical figures from Antonio Canova’s sculpture Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss (1793). Oversized representations of other marble works by the Italian Neoclassical artist and architect appeared around the stage. A sea of dancers in flowing costumes animated the pieces and evoked Canova’s masterful use of drapery.
Mascot heads of Italian operatic composers Giuseppe Verdi, Giacomo Puccini, and Gioacchino Rossini soon took center stage, led by a conductor evoking the spirit of Federico Fellini’s 1960 film, La Dolce Vita. A company of dancers dressed like music notes pranced around the stage. Three enormous paint tubes of red, yellow, and blue hues floated into view before slowly tipping forward. Reams of silky colored cloth dripped from their mouths and fanned across the ground like pools of paint.
In marched a technicolor parade dancers painted and adorned in head-to-toe shades of marigold, mint, fuschia, cerulean, lavender, and scarlet. Their costumes honored the country’s cultural contributions in the realms of art, food, architecture, fashion, cinema, design, music, scholarship, and more. Among the dancers dressed as the Coliseum and Bialetti coffee makers were tributes to Leonardo da Vinci and his famed Mona Lisa (c. 1503-6 until c. 1517).
The evening drew to a close with the traditional lighting of the cauldron—though this time there were two flames in two locations, symbolizing the dual host cities of this year’s Olympic Games, Milan and Cortina d’Ampezzo. Balich designed both cauldrons in collaboration with creative director Lida Castelli and artist Paolo Fantin. They took inspiration from da Vinci’s geometric knot studies.
