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Gaetano Donizetti's "L’Ange de Nisida" was commissioned by the director of the Théâtre de la Renaissance in Paris. The libretto was entrusted to Gustave Vaëz and Alphonse Royer, and the opéra en quatre parties was completed in 1840. Unfortunately the theatre went bankrupt and the opera never reached the stage. Donizetti was aware that other venues would have rejected his work as it stood, for both repertoire and censorship reasons (the plot revolved around the King of Naples, Ferdinando d’Aragona, and his mistress). Consequently, he revised the score and incorporated a significant portion of it within his new one, La favorite. 180 years after its composition, the opera was finally performed for the first time in its original theatrical form in Donizetti’s native Bergamo, at the construction site of the city theatre bearing his name, a most symbolic coincidence that added emotional value to a long-awaited event. The site became an element of director Francesco Micheli's dramaturgy, with the audience sitting in the first three tiers of boxes and on a dais on the stage, and the action taking place in the parterre, as in Elizabethan theatre. The staging's dramatic space reproduces a mass of sheets from the libretto and the score, scattered around as if they were an island, the island of Nisida. Lights, projections and costumes – amazingly made of paper – were designed to provide added reference to the plot and conceived to great effect. The performance was hailed as a triumph by both the public and the critics and was awarded a special prize at the 39th Franco Abbiati Prize of Italian music critics.