Sissi the Empress Comes to Rome: A Myth Rewritten as a Reckoning

Roberto Cavosi’s stage portrait trades the fairy-tale gloss for a bruising, modern Elisabeth of Austria with Federica Luna Vincenti at its fierce center.

Rome has seen its share of icons. Few arrive with a legend as polished, and a psyche as raw, as Empress Elisabeth of Austria, better known to pop culture as Sissi.

After a run across Italy that has drawn strong audience response, Sissi l’imperatrice (Sissi the Empress) opens at Teatro India for a limited engagement Jan. 27 through Feb. 1, 2026. Written and directed by Roberto Cavosi, the production is anchored by Federica Luna Vincenti, who plays Elisabeth not as a romanticized royal but as a woman trapped inside a story the world refuses to stop telling about her.

Not a princess, a pressure cooker

Cavosi strips away the familiar picture-book veneer: the gowns, the etiquette, the courtly choreography. What’s left is the engine underneath, restlessness, rage, grief, discipline, vanity, hunger (literal and existential). This Sissi isn’t the empire’s dream; she’s its dissent.

The show leans into Elisabeth’s contradictions: a figure celebrated for beauty who experiences beauty as confinement; an Empress who resists the imperial machine from within; a woman who can weaponize sarcasm and still crack open into vulnerability.

A series of tableaux, a mind in motion

Structured as a sequence of scenes, the piece moves through the Empress’s interior world - philosophy, sex, politics, art - as Elisabeth speaks directly, with a candor that can feel like a dare. The writing doesn’t soften her edges. It lets her be brilliant, cutting, defensive, exhausted and relentlessly contemporary.

There’s also the refuge: poetry. The production draws on Elisabeth’s diaries and her fascination with writers like Heine and Baudelaire, reframing the “romantic” Sissi as someone trying to metabolize pain into language.

Vincenti’s Elisabeth: glamour, unromanticized

The role requires contradiction as craft: a presence that can fill a room, and a fragility that can hollow it out. Vincenti’s performance has been widely praised for exactly that balance, magnetism without mythmaking, intensity without melodrama.

Creative team and cast

Alongside Vincenti, the cast includes Marco Manca, Miana Merisi, Maria Giulia Scarcella and Francesca Bruni Ercole.
Costumes are by Paola Marchesin, lighting by Gerardo Buzzanca, with original music by Oragravity. The production is by Goldenart Production in coproduction with Teatro Stabile di Bolzano and Teatro Stabile del Friuli Venezia Giulia - Il Rossetti.

Performance schedule

Teatro India (Rome)

Running time: approx. 90 minutes
Jan. 27 – Feb. 1, 2026

• Jan. 27 & Jan. 31: 9:00 p.m.
• Jan. 28–30 & Feb. 1: 7:30 p.m.

Tickets

Tickets are available through Teatro di Roma and the official Vivaticket listing.