Determined to conquer the operatic stage, sure enough by 1906, she was being paid $1,000 a night to perform at The Metropolitan Opera in New York. Her performance was met with terrible reviews and to make matters worse, around the same time, her Russian prince dumped her.īut the Italian beauty described as “the personification of Venus on earth” and already one of the most photographed faces of her time, didn’t give up there. She made her operatic debut in 1900 alongside famous singers in an ambitious production, but she was no Maria Callas. Lina was part of the tightlacing tradition that saw women use corsetry to create an “hour-glass” figure. They married and had a son, and he paid for Lina to have singing lessons to help bump her up from a vaudeville queen to an opera star. Petersburg where she fell in love with a Russian prince no less.

Lina began touring around Europe, particularly to St. From there, her striking looks got her through the doors of the Folies Bergère where she began performing and almost overnight, she had gone from the runaway orphan to the star of Paris vaudeville. She landed in Paris where she found a job singing at a café much like the one where Edith Piaf was discovered. Lina was orphaned at 15, and at the first opportunity, she ran away from the strict Roman Catholic of her orphanage nuns to join a travelling theatre troupe. But while her face would seem really familiar and well-known to most, the identity of Lina Cavalieri has been separated from her image and forgotten over time to become one of history’s most overlooked wallflowers.Īnd you would think we would have remembered someone who was considered one of the most beautiful women in the world, one of the defining icons of the Belle Époque era.

Her repeated face is the muse behind one of the most recognisable prints in interior design Piero Fornasetti’s eccentric plate series ‘Tema e Variazioni’, which over the years became a decorator’s go-to wallpaper or accessory for achieving a quirky and contemporary facelift. You definitely know her face, but do you know her story, her name, or that she even did actually exist?

Queen a night at the opera wallpaper