The Umberto Giordano Festival was first held on the 100th anniversary of the debut of Fedora in 1898, and the 50th anniversary of the composer's death in 1948. Giordano spent lengthy periods of work and vacationed in Baveno, in his splendid Villa Fedora. The Giordano Festival, initially entirely dedicated to music spanning the 19th and 20th centuries, to italian composers after Verdi and to their European and American contemporaries, ranges now to all music of the 20th century, to poetry and to other forms of performing art.