The widow of the late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny is leading calls for Italy to scrap a performance by a Russian orchestra conductor with close ties to Vladimir Putin at a music festival in southern Italy.
Valery Gergiev, who has been a close ally of Putin since the early 1990s, will perform in Europe for the first time since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine after being invited to Un’Estate da Re festival in La Reggia di Caserta, a former Bourbon palace and Unesco world heritage site in Campania, on 27 July.
