This small gem of an opera, first seen in Milan in August 1814, was a collaboration between the 22-year-old Rossini and the 26-year-old scholar-poet Felice Romani, already well on his way to becoming Italy’s most influential contemporary librettist. It’s a sophisticated affair, a distant relation by text to Mozart’s Così fan tutte, that had the misfortune to be written off by Milanese opinion as a re-run of L’italiana in Algeri, a smash-hit in Venice the previous year.

Another 146 years would pass before the Milanese (and others) would be shown the error of their ways when the opera was revived in Rome in 1950 by the distinguished Italian screenwriter, director and all-round man of theatre Gerardo Guerrieri. His interest was sparked by the opera’s use of a poet in search of a story, an interesting anticipation of Pirandello’s 1921 Absurdist drama Six Characters in Search of an Author. He was also shrewd enough to notice that this seemingly banal tale of an amorous Turk and guileful Italians was, in fact, a spoof on contemporary opera librettos, beneath whose surface Romani and Rossini have added a chilling disquisition on the perils of marital disloyalty.

It’s probably no coincidence that director Davide Livermore’s ‘big idea’ for this 2016 Pesaro Rossini Opera Festival staging references Italian cinema of the 1950s, more particularly the 1952 comedy Lo sceicco bianco (‘The White Sheik’), directed by Guerrieri’s colleague and contemporary Federico Fellini. Having never seen Lo sceicco bianco, I was at a bit of a loss as to what was going on visually in Livermore’s production, where there’s no scenery as such, just black drapes, and no obvious point (the Fellini references apart) to the ragbag of costumes deployed.

As to the actual production, there is none, aside from predictable set-piece moves by the principals and a good deal of random milling about by the chorus. ‘A chaotic romp’ was Hugh Canning’s succinct description of it all in Opera in 2016.

The cast is not without distinction, with Pietro Spagnoli attempting to hold the show together with a physically imposing performance of the poet, and Olga Peretyatko and Nicola Alaimo in the key roles of the warring couple, Fiorilla and her husband Geronio. Sadly, Peretyatko over-elaborates and rather runs out of steam in her great final scene, an astonishing display of anger, remorse and despair, after she’s been abandoned by the amorous Turk and locked out of her home by her husband. Alaimo’s performance, by contrast, is a joy from start to finish.

Needless to say, this isn’t a patch on Pesaro’s 2002 staging directed by Guido De Monticelli. That remains available as a Naxos DVD, albeit filmed in 2007 with a less good cast. (Alessandro Corbelli, that matchless Geronio, was no longer there.) Even better, perhaps, albeit now on Blu‑ray only, is the beautifully styled Luzzati-designed 2003 Pesaro production, which was revived and filmed in Genoa in 2009 with a rather more effective cast than the one Pesaro originally provided.