IT took eight pantechnicons and several flights to deliver coals to Newcastle – or rather, to transport an opera company from Yorkshire to the home of the genre - the land of Verdi, Donizetti, Puccini and Rossini, where arguably some of the world's sternest critics lay in wait.
Ravenna is the former administrative centre of the Roman Empire and Ostrogothic capital, home of the Byzantine government, and later a papal state which in 1861 became a city of the then Kingdom of Italy. Once a seaport, it is now five miles from a long sweep of beach, the city connected to the Adriatic by a canal.
A three-hour train journey south of Venice, Ravenna is in the province of Emilia Romagna and is chiefly famous for its late Roman and Byzantine mosaics, housed in its churches, basilicas and mausoleums. The precious pictures, many of them depicting saints or scenes from sacred texts, are the city's pride and joy.
A large number of these heritage sites host events during the five-week Ravenna Festival each summer.
A city of 135,000 souls and, it seems, nearly as many bicycles, Ravenna's Festival was inaugurated in 1990 by the world-famous conductor Riccardo Muti and his wife Cristina. The festival crosses genres, but is mostly about music, and aims to make a different mark on the vibrant Italian artistic scene by eschewing too many traditional choices in favour of guest artists who will bring something new and different.
When casting around for guest performances for this year's Festival, organisers researched Opera North on the internet and felt that the company's boundary-pushing repertoire of modern and traditional, straight opera and musical theatre fitted the vision of the Festival itself.
A reputation for innovation was the key to the invitation to appear in Ravenna, said Festival artistic director Franco Mazzotti. The Festival paid the company's costs of £600,000, including the transportation across Europe of tons of sets designed and built in Leeds.
All this, without Mazzotti and colleagues actually seeing in advance either of the two shows they were programming – Kurt Weill's 1940s' musical A Touch of Venus and the surreal dreamscape opera Julietta by Czech composer Bohuslav Martinu.
Opera North's 180-plus presence in Ravenna is conspicuous from the moment the visitor arrives and crosses Piazza del Popolo with its statue of San Vitale, Veneziano Palace, clock tower, and busy restaurant terraces. At 6.30pm, two hours before curtain up, through the windows of hotel rooms not far away, professional voices can be heard warming up – maybe in the shower. Scales, arpeggios and snatches of song sail down into the street on the still, heavy summer air.
In the Piazza, Opera North's management and families who've joined the company for part of the two-week visit to Ravenna, enjoy wine and nibbles.
The nearest bar to the Teatro Alighieri – the exquisite mini-La Scala which is ON's home for two weeks of rehearsal and six performances – has been renamed The North Bar, after the company's nearest watering hole in Leeds.
Known as a hemp house because of its traditional method of raising and lowering "flys" or backdrops using many ropes, the 150-year-old Teatro Alighieri has no means of bringing large pieces of set in through the backstage area.
They come in through the front door, down the main aisle of the auditorium and on to the stage via a special platform constructed in the orchestra pit (known in Italian as "il golfo mistico" or "the mystical hole", according to the sign on the door).
For both shows, the lighting rig has been brought from Leeds and reproduced exactly in Ravenna according to the original set-up from when they were first staged at The Grand, but tweaked according to the new surroundings.
The Italian audience's response to the witty and stylish Venus – a great hit in Leeds and on tour last winter with its story of a how a 3,000-year-old statue comes to life and causes mayhem by falling in love with the first geek she sets eyes on - is warm and enthusiastic.
Sung in English with Italian surtitles displayed neck-achingly high above the stage, most of the jokes have survived the translation, and the crowd of nearly 800 generally laughs in most of the right places.
After a 12-hour changeover shift for ON technicians working with Italian counterparts, the following night sees Festival-goers watching something dramatically different.
Julietta, first performed by ON in Leeds in 1997 and also in Prague in 2000, could not be more of a stylistic contrast with the smart and sassy Venus.
Requiring stamina from everyone involved, including the audience, it deals in dreams, ideal love, illusion, imagination and death.
Nothing is what it seems, everything is ethereal.
It is long, yet strangely, relentlessly gripping, with a tour de force by Paul Nilon at its heart.
By and large, Italians like their opera traditional – and they set exactingly high standards. What they're seeing from Opera North is, as much as anything, a test of open-mindedness.
"In a way, it must be difficult for any opera company to come here," says Piero Gelli, music critic for Italian state television network RAI. "But I would say this company has passed the test with very high marks. Its standards are comparable with many of our top companies."
"The critics and audiences here are amazed by the quality of both shows," said artistic director of the Ravenna Festival, Franco Mazzotti, who picked ON to appear alongside top artists and ensembles from as far and wide as the US, Slovenia, and Moscow as well as performers from La Scala, Milan. "In Italy, you don't have opera companies which also do musical theatre, requiring singing, acting and dancing. The standard of all of these has been exceptionally high. And the ideas in Julietta are very profound, the performances very intense and the effect on the audience a little disturbing. This is the kind of thing we should be doing.
"Another thing that's attractive about Opera North is that, unlike the very formal and hierarchical management of our important opera companies, this one is very close and cohesive."
According to Richard Mantle, general director of ON, the creative vision of the company and the Festival are very similar, and by a touch of serendipity, all but one of the original casts involved were available to travel to Italy, including the four American leads in Venus.
"We see this kind of work as very important, both in terms of becoming an international force but also in setting different new challenges for ourselves with new partners. We feel we're flying the flag for Yorkshire and the UK when we come here. Touring here and abroad helps to knit a company together and give it spirit. Feeling your work is appreciated in other countries as well as at home is also very good for morale.
"The Festival took something of a risk in agreeing to us bringing these two pieces, and in English.
"We thought the reaction to the jokes in Venus would be silent, but audiences have been great. After the first performance, the audience would not stop applauding, and in the end the cast had to be pulled back from dressing rooms to take another bow. You can't ask for more, really."
sheena.hastings@ypn.co.uk

Until the refurbished Grand Theatre reopens in September 2006, Opera North is based at Leeds Town Hall, and tours continue as usual. For new season programme details, call 0113 244 5326 or see www.operanorth.co.uk