Petras

Ben Mitas sipped Vinho Verde from a stemmed wineglass while he watched his daughter play on a swing one afternoon in January. He had bought the wine from a quiosque, the ubiquitous park kiosks, a luxury of living in Lisbon.

Mr. Mitas and his wife, Megan, moved to Portugal from Florida in 2019, renting a four-bedroom apartment for 2,500 euros (or about $2,700) a month in Campo de Ourique, a quiet neighborhood with small shops and restaurants. Last year, they bought a 19th-century house in Lapa, a historic neighborhood perched high above the river, with embassies and 18th-century palaces and mansions with tiled facades, that they will renovate into their “forever home,” said Ms. Mitas, 31. Mr. Mitas, 40, a mortgage broker, travels back to Florida frequently for work, but their life is in Lisbon where their two small children are in pre-K and day care.

The family fits right in. Here in the Portuguese capital, English speakers are seemingly everywhere. On the day Mr. Mitas took his daughter to the park, two women sat on a nearby bench, strollers at their feet, as they chatted in English.

The previous afternoon, Rita Silva, a researcher at Habita!, a housing rights organization, leaned forward intently on a tattered red sofa, her elbows on her knees, surrounded by bookshelves and hand-painted banners inside the group’s storefront headquarters in the trendy Intendente neighborhood. She was preparing to meet with Lisbon residents facing eviction. Even Habita! is feeling the squeeze: The group’s landlord will not renew its lease, which expires next year. Lisbon “stopped being affordable for the people who live and work in this country,” Ms. Silva said.

Americans, unable to afford the kinds of homes they want in the kinds of domestic cities where they want to live, like San Francisco and New York, are moving to Southern Europe in significant numbers. Drawn to the region by its mild climate and low cost of living, made even more affordable by a strong dollar, many Americans gush about trading a car-dependent lifestyle for the chance to live in a vibrant, European city on the cheap.

What is cheap for these Americans is brutally expensive for southern Europeans, whose average wages are substantially lower than Americans’. Locals are competing for housing against wealthy foreigners in markets already distorted by Airbnbs and corporate real estate investment. The result is a generation failing to launch, with more than 90 percent of southern Europeans under 35 still living at home , rates that eclipse their American counterparts . Those who have apartments face evictions and unpredictable rent increases in cities with weak rental protections, like Lisbon, Barcelona and Athens.

“It’s soul-breaking,” said Alkis Kafetzis, 40, a project coordinator at Eteron Institute for Research and Social Change in Athens, which studies housing inequities.

The surge in foreign investment is no accident. Portugal, Spain and Greece have courted deep-pocketed foreigners and corporations, hoping to attract talent, bolster their economies and spur development. Portugal and Spain recently introduced digital nomad visas that allow remote workers to live in the country for an extended period of time, echoing a similar visa in Greece. In Spain, home sales to Americans jumped by 88 percent from the first half of 2019 to the first half of 2022. Americans were among those willing to spend the most per square meter, bested only by the Danes in how much they paid in the first half of 2022, according to Spanish government data.

By 2022, nearly 10,000 American citizens were living in Portugal, up a stunning 239 percent from 2017, according to data provided by the Portuguese government.

The Americans who are setting roots here are embracing a life where the weather is pleasant, the lunches are long and they can get by with translation apps and a handful of phrases. Americans say that even if they attempt to stumble through a conversation, locals quickly switch to English since the language is so prevalent in European cities. But their children arrive home from school bilingual, giving parents like Mr. and Ms. Mitas access to tiny translators to help them navigate the tricky moments when Google Translate isn’t sufficient.

“Their main concern is lifestyle migration. They really, truly want to live here and have a more cosmopolitan lifestyle,” said Luis Mendes, an urban geographer at the University of Lisbon.

Baptized in the Aegean

“The way you live is so much more free and enjoyable here,” said Christian, 17, as his 8-year-old sister, Evangelia, glided past him on roller skates on her way to take a spin around the dining room table. “Everyone’s calm, it’s not like, ‘do this, do this, do that.’”

The Mallios family is from Colts Neck, N.J., a rural community in central New Jersey with sprawling estates and horse farms, including one owned by Bruce Springsteen.

They arrived in Greece in July 2020, after Melissa and Demetrios Mallios bought a €350,000 house on Evia, an island near Athens. The purchase qualified for a golden visa, a residency program available in several European countries that gives home buyers years of residency in exchange for spending a significant sum in cash on real estate.

The family spent the 2021 school year renting a house in Athens while their children attended an international school there. By 2022, Mr. and Ms. Mallios put their New Jersey home on the market, and bought the €1.45 million condo in Kifissia, a northern Athens suburb with tree-lined streets and multimillion-euro villas hidden behind high stone walls. At almost €427 a square foot, high-end homes sell in Kifissia for about 44 percent more than comparable ones in the rest of Athens, according to RE/Max Europe.

On a Sunday evening, families were strolling around Kifissia’s downtown, which is full of upscale restaurants, cafes and boutiques — Bottega Veneta, Max Mara and Wolford, the Austrian lingerie brand.

The Mallios children now attend a private virtual school, Pearson Online Academy, which allows them to shuttle between their homes in Athens and Evia, but hasn’t given Evangelia many opportunities to learn Greek and make local friends. “I miss New Jersey,” she said.

Her brother, however, has learned the language from his friends on the basketball team. “Throw in a couple ‘malakas’ in your sentence and you sound pretty fluent,” he said, referring to the common vulgarity. And her father, Mr. Mallios, 52, a venture capitalist of Greek descent, speaks the language.

In Athens, home prices were up 13 percent in the third quarter of 2022 compared to the same time a year earlier, according to the Bank of Greece. Americans are increasingly interested in Greece’s golden visa program, with applications up a stunning 740 percent from 2020 to 2021, according to Astons, an investment immigration firm.

Georg Petras, the chief executive of Engel & Völkers in Greece, said Americans flooded the Greek market in 2022, accounting for a quarter of his firm’s foreign transactions. If the trend continues, Americans will become the third largest group of foreign buyers that his company handles.

Tension is painted on the streets of Athens, where graffiti scrawled on the sides of buildings proclaims, “Athens is Not for Sale” and “No Airbnb.”

Greeks earn an average salary well below €20,000 a year in 2021 , according to Eurostat, and have been battered by economic turmoil, austerity and inflation. Almost half of Greek renters are struggling to pay the rent, according to a 2022 survey by the Eteron Institute. “Being able to get a breath, to feel a little bit secure about the future is the exception, not the rule,” Mr. Kafetzis of the Eteron Institute said. “This generation is always thinking about the next month.”

At 30, Spiros Stamou owns the taxi he drives, but still lives with his parents, as do his friends. Driving through central Athens, he lamented his lot. “Some people tried to get their own apartment, but ended up going back home,” he said, frustrated that it felt impossible for someone earning €600 a month to afford an apartment that costs €400 a month. “The cost of life, everything is getting higher,” he said.

But for Ms. Mallios, Greece has been transformational.

“When I was back in the States, I felt so out of place,” she said. When friends and family asked her why she chose to leave her home country, she replied: “I went for a beautiful life.”

Last summer, Ms. Mallios, 38, converted to Greek Orthodox at a ceremony at their island house. Wearing a white dress, her blond hair braided atop her head wrapped in a gold-leaf tiara, she was baptized in the Aegean Sea.

On a Lark

The sun was glistening on the Mediterranean Sea as Ryan Ward stood on a bedroom balcony of his house, nestled in the forest above the seaside village of Tossa de Mar, in Spain.

“Where I’m from in California, I could never afford a place like this,” said Mr. Ward, 37, who grew up in Orange County, Calif., where the average sales price is shy of $1 million .

Mr. Ward and his wife, Justyna Ward, bought the two-family home with a pool on the Costa Brava for €515,000 in February 2021. The couple lives with their infant and two-and-a-half-year-old sons in the three-bedroom apartment on the upper level of the duplex. They rent the two-bedroom apartment on Airbnb, and the entire house while they travel during the summer, earning enough rental income to pay the mortgage.

The Wards came to Spain in 2016 on a lark — Mr. Ward’s employer, a marketing firm, offered him a six-month stint in Barcelona that turned into a permanent one. Once they started a family, moving back to the United States didn’t make sense. California was too expensive and Chicago, where Ms. Ward, 36, grew up, was too cold. After living in Europe, they could no longer imagine relinquishing the Mediterranean lifestyle and cultural richness they’d come to cherish in Spain. “What’s the point of moving back?” Ms. Ward said as she sat on her sofa, nursing her newborn son, taking in the breathtaking view of the sea.

Foreigners are plucking up homes along the Spanish Coast, from Costa Brava in the north to Andalusia in the south. Spain’s new digital nomad visa allows remote workers and freelancers to live in the country year round, as long as they earn most of their income outside of Spain and meet other requirements . Pay €500,000 in cash for property, and a foreigner can qualify for a golden visa. From January 2022 to January 2023, the number of parents from the United States looking for schools on the International Schools Database, a website, doubled, with Spain topping the list of destinations.

“If you can make €100,000 a year, you will live very well here,” said Raf Jacobs, the founder of Inspire Property Experts, a real estate consultancy that helps foreigners settle in Spain.

The average Spanish salary was less than €30,000 a year in 2021. In Barcelona, rents have been rising for a decade, reaching an all-time high of €1,077 a month in the fourth quarter of 2022.

“Homeownership society is in crisis in Spain,” said Carme Arcarazo, advocacy coordinator for Sindicat de Llogaters, a Barcelona tenants union.

Globe-trotting newcomers are not to blame for the crisis, said Jaime Palomera, a housing researcher for the Barcelona Urban Research Institute. Investment firms like Goldman Sachs and Blackstone swooped in and bought thousands of distressed properties in the wake of the global financial crisis , turning homes into securitized assets, he said. “This is much bigger than any individual American buying a home here,” he said. “Regardless of your nationality, are you going to buy that home to live in it or you going to buy it as an asset in order to drive up the rent as much as possible?”

‘Life Isn’t Fair’

In Lisbon, the average rent for a two-bedroom apartment, at €1,700 a month in February, was up 39 percent from a year ago, and the average sales price for a two-bedroom was up 10 percent, to €457,730, according to Casafari , a real estate data company.

Between 2020 and 2021, the number of North Americans moving to Portugal doubled , at a time when migration from Europe and South America fell. Private schools have waiting lists and new ones are opening. In 2019, the number of Americans coming to the Carlucci American International School of Lisbon jumped by 60 percent, said Nate Chapman, the school’s director. Now, Americans account for a quarter of his student body, up from 16 percent a decade ago. “Right now is a bit of a gold rush,” he said.

For the Portuguese, with an average salary below €20,000 a year in 2021 , the influx of Americans and subsequent rising prices are unsustainable.

Ms. Silva of Habita! said rent protections eliminated in the wake of the global financial crisis left tenants vulnerable to eviction and untenable rent increases. Inside her group’s headquarters, folding chairs were arranged in a circle beneath a yellow tapestry, emblazoned with the phrase, “Casas são para morar” or “houses are for living.” Outside, scaffolding and cranes are as common as the sound of the tourists’ suitcase wheels clattering along the calçada portuguesa, the city’s iconic squared cobblestones.

“We have an explosion of urban reinvestment. It’s all for tourism, it’s all for luxury,” Ms. Silva said.

In response to the mounting housing crisis, Portugal ended its golden visa program in February, part of a sweeping package of changes. Last year, Americans bought more Portuguese golden visas than any other nationality in the world, edging out the Chinese. It was a dramatic reversal for Americans who, just four years earlier, weren’t among the top five buyers of the visa.

Other visa programs for foreigners with means remain intact.

Amelia Guertin has been in the country on and off for the last year, living on a tourist visa while she applies for a long-term one. She arrived in Portugal after living in Hawaii, San Francisco and New York City, cities that felt “wildly unaffordable,” she said. Immediately, she knew she wanted to settle in a place that felt cosmopolitan, but also laid back.

Earlier this year, she hunched over a laptop with her architect, Hannah Reusser, at Rove , a Lisbon bar with plush velvet sofas, exposed ductwork and moody lighting. Ms. Guertin, 31, had already started demolition on a small house she bought last October for €320,000 in Aroeira, a seaside town south of Lisbon, where she can surf.

Ms. Reusser discussed making the three-bedroom, two-bath space more functional, suggesting she rearrange the kitchen and living room. Ms. Guertin, the chief operating officer for a British tech start-up, pushed Ms. Reusser on the deadline. Was June realistic? Ms. Reusser worried it was too ambitious, given pandemic delays and material shortages.

An hour later, Ms. Guertin rushed down cobblestone streets, heading to her Portuguese language lesson a few blocks away, worrying about the schedule. “In Portugal, you have to have a lot of patience,” said Ms. Guertin. “It feels disorganized, but I have confidence that it’s going to get done.”

At Da Noi , a tiny restaurant in central Lisbon, diners squeezed into tables and those who had come for drinks spilled out onto the street, talking in English, German and French. Mixing an Aperol spritz behind the bar was Simāo Martins, 22, an economics student at the University of Lisbon. He works full time, but lives at home with his mother, just like his friends.

“I don’t want to be under her roof forever,” he said. If he got his own apartment, he estimated half of his income would go to rent. So he is contemplating moving to Brazil or the Italian countryside, where the cost of living might be lower. Portugal “is cheap here for you, but not for us,” he told a reporter. “And that bothers me.”

The previous night, about a dozen foreigners and local Portuguese had gathered around a large wooden table at a restaurant for the OneThousandClub , an organization that encourages foreigners and Portuguese to mingle. But the room fell silent when one of the Portuguese guests, Hugo Janes, 44, asked how many would stay if the country were not a tax haven for foreigners.

The vibe turned defensive as the guests, a mix of French, Belgian and Americans, defended their tax status. In the debate, the Americans argued that they pay taxes to the United States.

These policies “are a catastrophe for the Portuguese,” Mr. Janes, a product manager for Vodafone, told a reporter, voicing a growing resentment among his compatriots. “Life isn’t fair, but there needs to be some fairness.”

Bisco Smith , 42, an American graffiti artist who moved from New York to Lisbon with his wife, Jasmine, 39, and their young son, almost a year ago, has mixed feelings about his newfound city.

“There’s a countrywide gentrification happening here. And it doesn’t feel good,” he said, sitting in his 2,000-square-foot artist’s studio near the Beato Creative Hub , an innovation center. “I don’t want to be the American that’s here taking advantage of or displacing people.”

Yet, Lisbon has been a welcoming city after a difficult period in New York, when he and his wife survived two serious car accidents. Since arriving in Lisbon, he joined a father’s group called Expat Dudes and Dads, and his son is learning Portuguese in preschool. “Lisbon means safe harbor,” he said. “My family needed safe harbor and we found it here.”

Jerry Samuels, who under the name Napoleon XIV recorded one of the 1960s’ strangest and most successful novelty songs, “They’re Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa!,” died on March 10 in Phoenixville, Pa. He was 84.

His son Jason said the cause was complications of dementia and Parkinson’s disease.

Mr. Samuels had had modest success as a songwriter and was working as an engineer at Associated Recording Studios in New York when, in 1966, he and a fellow engineer, Nat Schnapf, set a bit of doggerel that Mr. Samuels had written to — well, “music” may not be quite the right word, since the song consists of Mr. Samuels rhythmically talking over a backing of tambourine, snare and bass drums, and clapping.

The narrator laments that he has been left by a loved one and has been driven insane as a result:

They’re coming to take me away, ha-haaa They’re coming to take me away Ho-ho, hee-hee, ha-ha, to the funny farm Where life is beautiful all the time And I’ll be happy to see those nice young men in their clean white coats And they’re coming to take me away, ha-ha.

Only in the last verse does the listener learn that it wasn’t a woman who left the now crazed gent, but a dog.

Through recording studio manipulation that was innovative for the time, Mr. Samuels’s voice morphed into high-pitched lunacy as the choruses went along.

In a memoir, Mr. Samuels wrote that he wanted to use a stage name for the record and a drummer friend suggested Napoleon. Someone else suggested adding some kind of appendage.

“I picked XIV strictly because I liked how it looked next to Napoleon,” Mr. Samuels wrote. “Rumors were rampant about hidden meanings, but there were none, at least not consciously.”

The record was released by Warner Bros. in July 1966 (the flip side was the song played backward), but no station would play it until WABC in New York, one of the nation’s leading Top 40 stations, broadcast an excerpt as a gag, Mr. Samuels wrote. Listeners began calling in wanting to hear the whole thing.

After that, stations everywhere picked up on it; news accounts of the day said it sold half a million copies in five days. Britain caught the fever, too.

“The Beatles don’t usually find it hard work hanging on to the top spot,” The Derby Evening Telegraph of England wrote in August 1966, when “Yellow Submarine” was No. 1 on the newspaper’s record chart, “but in Derby’s Top Twenty this week they face tough competition from the Beach Boys’ ‘God Only Knows’ and Napoleon XIV’s incredibly sick ‘They’re Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa!’”

The record was too sick for some: The influential Detroit-area station CKLW, among others, stopped playing it after receiving many complaints that it mocked mental illness.

“Those naysayers kept it up,” Mr. Samuels wrote, “and the record rapidly spiraled off the charts.”

But not before peaking at No. 3 on Billboard’s Hot 100. The song has been covered by various artists, and in the 1980s Mr. Samuels recorded a follow-up, “They’re Coming to Get Me Again, Ha-Haaa!” It drew little attention, but it did yield a funny story that Mr. Samuels recounted in the memoir.

When he recorded the original, he had asked friends to show up at the studio to do the clapping part, but only two did. Wanting a bigger clapping sound, he suggested that they drop their pants and slap their thighs, to double the noise. They declined, and he and Mr. Schnapf ended up using overdubbing to beef up the sound. But when he recorded the sequel, a dozen clappers turned out.

“Some were in shorts,” he wrote, “others lowered their trousers, but the whole group was slapping their tender thighs in that little studio.”

Jerrold Laurence Samuels was born on May 3, 1938, in Manhattan to Joseph and Lillian (Wandler) Samuels. He grew up in the Bronx.

His parents had bought a piano for his older brother.

“He never took to it, but I did,” Mr. Samuels wrote. “My parents said that I began playing recognizable tunes at around 3 years old.”

By his teenage years he had begun writing songs and shopping them to publishers. One in particular had potential, especially after the lyricist Sol Parker helped him polish it: “To Ev’ry Girl — To Ev’ry Boy.” It was recorded in 1954 by Johnnie Ray, a teenage-idol singer.

Another of his songs, “The Shelter of Your Arms,” was recorded by Sammy Davis Jr., who made it the title track of a 1964 album.

In an interview quoted on Wayne Jancik’s website about one-hit wonders , Mr. Samuels said that nine years before recording “They’re Coming to Take Me Away,” he spent eight months in a psychiatric hospital.

“When I did the record, I knew it wouldn’t offend mental patients,” he said. “I would have laughed at it if I had heard it when I was in the hospital.”

His first marriage, to Rosemary Djivre, ended in divorce in 1968. He had a relationship with Petra Vesters from 1973 to 1987. In addition to his son Jason, from his relationship with Ms. Vesters (now Petra DeWall), he is survived by his second wife, Bobbie (Simon) Samuels, whom he married in 1996; a son from his first marriage, Scott; four grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren. Another son, Eric, died in 1991.

Mr. Samuels, who lived in King of Prussia, Pa., outside Philadelphia, said he made one public appearance costumed as Napoleon XIV but found the experience humiliating and didn’t repeat it. He had a long history of playing piano in bars and other venues, his son Jason said, including senior centers.

“He knew all the old standards from George Gershwin and Irving Berlin,” Jason Samuels said in a phone interview. “They loved him.”

He was getting so many bookings that he saw a business opportunity. In 1984, he formed the Jerry Samuels Agency to book other acts into retirement communities and other small venues. Bobbie Samuels joined him in the enterprise, which, Jason Samuels said, had booked some 30,000 shows in the Philadelphia area by the time they retired in 2021.

SCREEN versions of Verdi’s masterful ”Otello” aren’t so common that one should be flip about an adaptation as full of good things as Franco Zeffirelli’s new film, which opens today at the Cinema 1.

Placido Domingo stars in the title role, surpassing his work in Francesco Rosi’s far more exciting screen adaptation of ”Carmen,” to give what is probably his best screen performance to date. It has an excellent supporting cast headed by Justino Diaz as Iago and Katia Ricciarelli as Desdemona, and it has been richly photographed by Ennio Guarnieri, whose credits include Mr. Zeffirelli’s exhilarating screen version of ”La Traviata,” which co-starred Mr. Domingo with Teresa Stratas.

Yet one does become apprehensive at the very beginning of this ”Otello,” when it’s apparent that Mr. Zeffirelli hasn’t found – as he did in ”La Traviata” – the manner by which opera and film are effortlessly made to seem one. Verdi’s magnificent storm music, with which the opera opens, must fight for a place on the movie soundtrack with the great whooshing noises of a simulated real storm. At the same time, the simulated real rain is coming down in such quantity that the chorus of Cypriots – standing on the quay awaiting the arrival of Otello’s ship, their mouths wide open in rousing song – might well be expected to fill up with water in a minute, as if they were bailing buckets.

In the interests of realism and (I suppose) of pictorial splendor, Mr. Zeffirelli has gone about half the distance in destylizing the opera, in using close-ups and flashbacks and in shooting a lot of the film on location in Crete and in a 12th-century Swabian castle in southern Italy. It’s these various attempts at realism and pictorial splendor that keep interfering with the flow of this most intense, most dramatically packed of Verdi’s great musical dramas.

Verdi was 74 years old when ”Otello” had its premiere at La Scala in 1887, 40 years after his ”Macbeth” and 34 years after ”La Traviata.” He was nearing the end of a career of singular length and productivity. ”Otello” is the work of a composer who has come to possess such technical virtuosity that the entire opera has the effect of being one breathtaking inspiration.

There are set-pieces in it – the love duet at the end of Act I, Iago’s ”Credo” in Act II, the complex ”double-duets” in Act III. However, no single moment stands above the rest of the work. Melody, which cascades through ”La Traviata,” is used sparingly in ”Otello.” It’s as if melody represented everything – including their love and a sense of order – that Otello and Desdemona are in the process of losing, as much because of their own weakness as because of Iago’s primal malevolence.

The conciseness of the Verdi score and of the Boito libretto – a magical distillation of Shakespeare – would seem to make the opera a natural for a screen adaptation, a presentation in which the work is experienced in one headlong gulp, without the relief of leisurely intermissions. Yet Mr. Zeffirelli’s choices are designed to deconstruct the opera, to break it up into bits and pieces.

One result is that although Mr. Zeffirelli has cut the opera by about half an hour, the movie seems to run longer than an uncut recording.

Instead of being a cohesive entity, this ”Otello” is composed of fine, isolated moments, which alternate with others that aren’t so fine. Mr. Domingo, wearing more or less conventional theatrical blackface, has physical as well as vocal grandeur. He fills the screen with passion and ill-fated purpose. Miss Ricciarelli looks more like a Brunnhilde than a patrician blond Venetian, yet she gives a lovely, delicate performance in a role that must be one of the most thankless in all stage literature.

Mr. Diaz’s Iago is also as beautifully acted as it’s sung. Most of the time Mr. Zeffirelli treats the leading characters with the care they might receive in a stage production. One major exception is his decision to interrupt the love duet to give us a montage in which we see something of Otello’s sad boyhood in the desert. For some strange reason, the boy Otello appears to have been a completely different color from the man he grew into.

An even more gross interruption is the director’s decision to show us Cassio, naked on his bed and in the midst of an erotic dream about Desdemona, in the manner in which he’s being described by Iago to Otello. Similarly brief reflections worked quite well in ”La Traviata,” but they defuse the emotional impact of a work as compressed in focus as ”Otello.”

Mr. Zeffirelli’s screen adaptation of ”La Traviata” helped to reveal the original. However sincere his intentions in adapting ”Otello,” Mr. Zeffirelli less often reveals the original than he ornaments it.

A note of caution: At the screening I attended, I had the impression that the lip-synch was off by just a fraction of a second. People who have seen the film at other screenings say there was no problem. I mention this because there can be vast differences in the quality of sound between one screening and another, and between one theater and another.

”Otello,” which has been rated PG (”Parental Guidance Suggested”), includes one murder and one suicide.

HANKY-PANKY – OTELLO, directed by Franco Zeffirelli; director of photography, Ennio Guarnieri; film editors, Peter Taylor and Franca Silvi; music by Giuseppe Verdi; music produced and conducted by Lorin Maazel; orchestra and chorus of Teatro alla Scala; produced by Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus; released by the Cannon Group Inc. At Cinema 1, Third Avenue at 60th Street. Running time: 122 minutes. This film is rated PG. Otello…Placido Domingo; Desdemona…Katia Ricciarelli; Iago…Justino Diaz; Emilia…Petra Malakova; Cassio…Urbano Barberini; Lodovico…Massimo Foschi; Montano…Edwin Francis; Roderigo…Sergio Nicolai; Brabanzio…Remo Remotti; Doge…Antonio Pierfederici; The voices of Cassio, Lodovico, Roderigo, Montano and Araldo are sung by: Ezio Di Cesare, John Macurdy, Costantin Zaharia, Edward Toumajin and Giannicola Pigliucci