Forced removals are as hot a topic in today’s Italy as they were in 1951, when Vittorio De Sica filmed Miracolo a Milano. The film is the basis of a new opera by Giorgio Battistelli, the composer still best-known for putting bricklayers and pasta-makers on stage for his 1981 Experimentum Mundi.

Battistelli has termed his Miracolo a Milano a “mute opera”, and circumvented the problem of an effective libretto by having no words at all. Instead, the Coro dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia hums, moans and sighs in the orchestra pit, while a team of actors and a percussionist create a range of sounds on the stage, rubbing their hands together against imagined cold, dripping water into tubs, hammering the walls of their tin shacks.