How Ultimo & Vivo Concerti Staged One Of Europe’s Biggest Concerts

It’s done. Ultimo‘s historic July 4 concert, “La Favola Per Sempre,” is one for the books. The “Forever Fairytale” turned out to be exactly that: a concert fairytale told for 250,000 people gathered on the campus of the University of Rome Tor Vergata, who will remember it forever.

Pollstar reached out to Clemente Zard, son of the late Italian impresario David Zard, Managing Director of Vivo Concerti, and leader of the team of mavericks that just pulled of one of the greatest feats in concert history.

“Well,” he starts, “it has definitely been the biggest experience of my entire life. It has also been the most challenging. I still haven’t fully realized what we’ve done, because it is not comparable to anything we’ve ever done before.”

How does one even begin to confidently put 250,000 tickets on sale for one single show? It just sounds like a ridiculously high number, irrespective of how popular the artist may be. But Zard was never in doubt. He explains, “Ultimo, at this moment, is the biggest act in Italy. The second most popular is not even close. He is a pop singer, who really speaks to people’s emotions. We could have sold half a million tickets within two or three hours more, but we stopped at 250,000.”

The most challenging part, he says, wasn’t production, even though it was epic: a main stage measuring 140 meters wide and 60 meters high, crowned by an gigantic illuminated structure replicating Ultimo’s signature, and connected to the audience by a 30-meter infinity-shaped catwalk. More than 40 kilometers of crowd barriers were deployed across the site, as well as 38 audio and video towers to carry the action on stage into every corner of the venue.

Yet, the biggest challenge was ensuring a smooth operation across the site and, indeed, the city of Rome, which is home to more than four million inhabitants in its broader metropolitan area, and host to millions of tourists at any give time of the year.

Vivo Concerti had made a deal with ATAC Roma, the city’s public transport authority, to keep the metro system open all night, and allow concertgoers with a ticket to use it for free – something that, according to Zard, had never been done before in Italy. In addition to that, he recalls, “we had 160 shuttles taking guests from the subway stations to the concert site. We had 1,100 parking spots for busses, and 25,000 spots for cars.”

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At quarter past eight, around one hour before showtime, 95% of people had already arrived on site – an incredible logistical feat only possible because all involved brought their A-game, and not just upon arrival, but after the show, as well. “When you leave a stadium, it can take you an hour, an hour-and-a-half, or more to get home, and a stadium is 60,000, 70,000, 80,000 max. Now play it through with three times that capacity, and a site that has never hosted a crowd the size of the population of Verona. At around midnight they all began their journeys home, and watching them all move together was breathtaking, really breathtaking,” says Zard.

Ultimo writes his lyrics in Italian, so it’s no wonder that 97.5% of visitors came from Italy. The remaining 2.5% hailed from more than 70 countries, according to Vivo Concerti’s geographic breakdown of ticket buyers. The list includes almost all of Europe, but also far-flung places like Barbados, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Hong King, Swaziland, Russia, the UAE, Papua New Guinea and many more.

Arriving on site, one could only guess how much work had gone into getting the university campus concert ready. Zard breaks it down: “You need to create everything from scratch, and this means a lot of work for a lot of people, and a lot of money being invested. We had 158 kilometers of cables, 3,000 toilets, 3,500 security operators. Usually, for a regular show, you have a production manager and a site coordinator. We had 20 site coordinators! We had people that were tasked with clearing the grass of insects. Parking spots had to be created on fields which we rented for the purpose. Some required additional work, so 25 days were spent just moving the earth with the help of excavators and other machines. We’re not building contractors, our job usually doesn’t involve this kind of work. These are all reasons why it has really been the most challenging experience for all of us. And so I cannot explain you the sensation that ran through all of our bodies, when it all finally came together.”

It took three-and-a-half months, more than 10,000 people working across production, logistics, operations and services, and more than 500 trucks transporting staging, delay towers, grandstands and production equipment to complete and run the site. To ensure the well-being of all guests, the site also featured 10 first-aid stations and 20 ambulances attended by over 500 medical professionals; 20 water tanks supplying 560 free refill points; and a choice of 46 arena concession stands, 48 food trucks, and 170 roaming vendors.

Vivo Concerti had also invested in a dedicated app for the show, as well as 5G connectivity across the campus. The entire event was cashless, from merch to food and beverage. “We hired people that have worked on the Olympics and other big events. We wanted the best. And I really need to congratulate my team, because this was an impressive, unprecedented challenge. We didn’t have a benchmark, we created the benchmark,” says Zard.

Pulling off an event of this scale was only possible thanks to a multidisciplinary collaboration between Vivo Concerti, the University of Rome Tor Vergata and the City of Rome, with the support of Mayor Roberto Gualtieri, the Councillor for Major Events, Sport, Tourism and Fashion, Alessandro Onorato, and Rector Nathan Levialdi Ghiron, as well as CTS Eventim’s TicketOne, which delivered this crazy amount of tickets in the first place.

Not knowing what challenges would await the team, and therefore what to budget for, it’s no surprise that ““”you don’t make a profit. At a certain point the budget just gets out of control. Next time, if there is such a thing, I’ll have a benchmark and therefore a real budget,” Zard explains, adding “the site would have probably been perfect for between 170,000 to 180,000 people. Anything more, and costs begin to rise exponentially. After all, we’re not talking about 250,000 tickets, but 250,000 people, real, living people, all with individual needs. It is a very complex operation, very difficult, and I don’t know if we’re going to do something like this again. But if we did, we’d have a lot of experience to fall back on.”

While doing this interview, Zard was sitting in a car on his way to San Siro Stadium in Milan, for two shows by Italian rap star Sfera Ebbasta, July 8-9 – two of six sold-out stadium shows promoted by Vivo Concerti in just five days.

“After what we’ve accomplished last weekend, they feel like club shows,” says Zard, only half-joking, “once you’ve accomplished such a big thing, such a complex thing, you start looking at your business in a different way. You become much more comfortable, much more confident, and I can say without a shadow of a doubt, that I have the best team in the country. The head of production of Vivo, he’s called Pippo [Lopez], and the general manager, that’s Andrea [Ritrovato], they did a huge job, just like Martina [Pirli], our head of communications, who made sure that we were visible everywhere in the lead-up to the concert.”

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It’s impossible to pick one highlight from a spectacle as grand as Ultimo’s “La Favola per Sempre”. Zard says, “I will remember every single moment of this concert. When it started, 60% of my heads of all the different departments started to cry, because it meant that we had really done it – after one-and-a-half years of working on it, and everybody telling us, ‘you’re crazy, you’re gonna crash, you’ll never make it.’ That’s heavy. We’re young, I’m 36, we’re all young people, and when all the oldies tell you that you’ll never make it, and then you make it, that’s the biggest satisfaction.”

And the fairytale continues, as Ultimo embarks on the “La Favola Continua…” stadium tour in the summer of 2027. The tour had only been on sale a few hours when Pollstar spoke with Zard for this feature, and had already sold more than half a million tickets, according to the promoter, who concludes, “Moments like that are the real reason we work in this business: to feel alive, like we felt alive on that Saturday night. It is the best sensation you can ever have in your life, better than anything.”

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