The Italian conductor Riccardo Muti recently took his Luigi Cherubini Youth Orchestra to perform a concert in a Milan prison.

The concert was performed on instruments crafted by the prison's inmates during violin-making workshops, and each instrument was made of wood taken from shipwrecked boats carrying migrants and refugees. The inmates have also used this wood elsewhere in the prison to make items such as flowerpots.

The concert was part of the Ravenna Festival's "Ways of Friendship" project, which was founded in 1997 and uses music as a sign of hope, dialogue, and fraternity in places marked by conflict or social difficulty.

The program featured Vivaldi's Concerto in A major for strings and harpsichord, alongside works by Verdi, including the overture to Nabucco and the "Ave Maria" from Otello with soprano Rosa Feola.

The final item of the concert was a set of readings of poems and testimonies written by the prisoners. The choir then sang the "Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves" from Verdi's Nabucco, and they were joined by some of the inmates, many of whom were moved to tears.

"Music is conceived in many different parts, musical lines, which wind at the same time, playing different lines from each other but which tend to compliment each other, not to contradict themselves continuously," Muti said. "It is the dialogue of different parts that tend to the harmony of us all...the concept of society and politics should imitate this."

"Of course prison is a closed place, difficult, but even here you can find yourself — especially through art," he added. "I felt much more emotion, creativity and deeper spirituality here than outside."