MILAN (AP) — Featuring tributes to da Vinci and Dante, Puccini and Pausini, Armani and Fellini, pasta and vino, and other iconic tastes of Italian culture — plus Mariah Carey hitting all the high notes in “Nel Blu Dipinto Di Blu” aka “Volare” — an unprecedented four-site, dual-cauldron opening ceremony got the Milan Cortina Olympics officially started Friday.
Allowing athletes to participate in the Parade of Nations at the mountain locales for the most spread-out Winter Games in history created what perhaps was an unintended consequence: Zero competitors from any of the first five countries actually showed up at the main hub, Milan’s San Siro soccer stadium.
While signs bearing the names of Greece — which always leads the procession as the birthplace of the Olympics — Albania, Andorra, Saudi Arabia and Argentina were carried into the home of Serie A soccer titans AC Milan and Inter Milan, there were no athletes from those places around: Instead, they were participating at simultaneous festivities held at Cortina d’Ampezzo in the heart of the Dolomites, Livigno in the Alps, and Predazzo in the autonomous province of Trento.
For good measure, the Feb. 22 closing ceremony will be held in yet another locale, Verona, where Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” was set.
Another symbol of how far-flung things are this time: Instead of the usual one cauldron that is lit and burns throughout the Olympics, there will be two, both intended as an homage to Leonardo da Vinci’s geometric studies. One is in Milan, 2½ miles (4 kilometers) from San Siro, and the other is going to be 250 miles (400 kilometers) away in Cortina.
The people given the honor of lighting both following a ceremony expected to last 2 1/2 hours was a closely guarded secret, as is usually the case at any Olympics. At the 2006 Turin Games, it was Italian cross-country skier Stefania Belmondo.
The full collection of competition venues for the next two-plus weeks dot an area of about 8,500 square miles (more than 22,000 square kilometers), roughly the size of the entire state of New Jersey. The multi-city ceremony format Friday allowed up-in-the-mountains sports such as Alpine skiing, bobsled, curling and snowboarding to be represented without requiring folks to make the several-hours-long trek to Milan, the country’s financial capital.
The first country with athletes at San Siro was Armenia — and their entrance drew raucous cheers from a crowd filled with 61,000 ticket-holders plus others.
Later, a smattering of boos met Israel’s four representatives at the Milan ceremony. There have been some calls for Israel to be banned from the Olympics over the war in Gaza, which began with Hamas’ deadly attack in October 2023.
Some wondered ahead of time what sort of greeting would be received by the athletes from the U.S., who were scheduled to be among the final ones to take part Friday because the next Games will be hosted by Los Angeles in 2028. U.S. Vice President JD Vance was at San Siro.
The ceremony’s organizers have said they sought to convey themes of harmony and peace, seeking to represent the city-mountain dichotomy of the particularly unusual setup for these Olympics while also trying to appeal to a sense of unity at a time of global tensions.
“I hope the opening ceremony is seen by everyone as an opportunity to be respectful,” new International Olympic Committee President Kirsty Coventry said when asked this week about possible crowd reactions.
It didn’t exactly feel like a Winter Games in Milan, where the temperature was a tad below 50 degrees Fahrenheit (10 degrees Celsius), and the sky was a crisp, clear azure all afternoon Friday. Not a trace of clouds, let alone snow.
As Italy welcomed the world by displaying symbols of its heritage, the show produced by Olympic ceremony veteran Marco Balich began with dancers from the academy of the famed Milan opera house Teatro alla Scala reimagining 18th-century sculptor Antonio Canova’s marble works.
People wearing oversized, mascot-style heads representing opera composers Giacomo Puccini, Gioachino Rossini and Giuseppe Verdi appeared on the central stage, before giant paint tubes floated above and dropped silk of red, blue and yellow — the primary colors — before an early parade of various-color-wearing characters arrived in the stadium. They represented music and art, literature and architecture, appreciations for beauty and history and, above all, “La Dolce Vita” (loosely, Italian for “The Good Life” and the name of a 1960 film by Federico Fellini).
There were references to ancient Rome, the Renaissance, the Venice Carnival and the country’s noted traditions in various areas such as cuisine and literature, such as “Pinocchio” and Dante’s “Inferno.”
A runway walk showcased outfits — created by the late fashion designer Giorgio Armani, who died last year at 91 — in the colors of Italy’s flag: red, green and white. And balladeer Laura Pausini sang Italy’s national anthem.
Carey got loud cheers in Milan as she sang in Italian. In Cortina, hundreds of fans sang along with her, and a roar emerged when they realized she was performing the song with the “Volare” refrain.
Another local touch: Italian actress Sabrina Impacciatore, of “White Lotus” fame, was to introduce a section that took viewers through a century of past Olympics, with examples of evolving equipment, sportswear and music. And actress and comedian Brenda Lodigiani was invited to demonstrate the popular Italian hand gestures often used to communicate in place of words.
Associated Press writer Colleen Barry contributed to this report.
AP Olympics: https://apnews.com/hub/milan-cortina-2026-winter-olympics
