The choir's video is resonating around the world. It begins with Irene, a 17-year-old high school student, singing the opening lines from her home in the countryside outside Rome. “Helplessly hoping ...

Dementia has taken away the ability to speak for some of this choir, made up of Italian migrants, but when the music starts it brings the memories of their far-away home flooding back.

On May 4, some of the performers who will bring “Il Matrimonio Segreto” to this year’s Spoleto Festival were on a ship that docked in Savannah, Ga. The diminutive Italian figures had traveled in the ...