ITALIAN opera, one of the country’s most treasured cultural assets, is in financial crisis, with three top houses admitting this week that they are on the verge of bankruptcy.

La Fenice in Venice, the Carlo Felice opera house in Genoa and the San Carlo in Naples all blame government spending cuts for their predicament. La Fenice, which reopened two years ago after a €90 million (£61 million), eight-year reconstruction after a fire, has incurred annual losses of €3 million.

The Genoa opera house predicts losses of €4.6 million. The San Carlo opera house in Naples, Italy’s oldest and arguably most beautiful opera theatre, expects a deficit of almost €7 million. Gioacchino Lanza Tomasi, the general manager of the San Carlo, said: “We are staring disaster in the face. Only public funds can plug a gap of that size.” He said he had avoided cutting operas such as next month’s Marriage of Figaro only by cancelling ballet performances.

If the deficits exceed €5 million, the opera houses will automatically be declared bankrupt and taken over by a government-appointed “commissar” — the fate that befell Florence’s opera house, the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, in the autumn.

The crisis has been blamed on Silvio Berlusconi, the Prime Minister, who only two months before a general election, faces accusations of neglecting the country’s cultural heritage. Across Italy, arts budgets have been cut as Signor Berlusconi’s Government attempts to plug a huge budget deficit.

Economy Ministry officials argue that Italian opera has become “fat on subsidies”. Nearly half of Italy’s arts budget of €500 million, which is being cut by one third, is spent on opera. Giampaolo Vianello, the general manager of La Fenice, said: “We play to full houses, but the costs are huge. We haven’t got a single euro to spare.” Signor Vianello said that Venice city council and the Veneto region were “seeking ways to prevent shortage of cash from doing what the flames did not manage to do ten years ago”.

In Genoa, Gennaro Di Benedetto, general manager of the Carlo Felice, said it was “dangerously close” to the €5 million deficit that would trigger state intervention. Signor Di Benedetto said he had been forced to “cut the current season to the bone”, dropping performances of Janácek’s Katia Kabanova and Verdi’s Un Ballo in Maschera.

Italy’s 13 opera houses, formerly state owned, have been run since 1995 by foundations funded by sponsorship, private investment and state subsidies. In Milan the troubled La Scala opera house was reopened in December with Mozart’s Idomeneo under the British conductor Daniel Harding, after the departure of Riccardo Muti as musical director because of “artistic disagreements”, aggravated by tensions over budget cuts.

Francesco Giambrone, general manager of the Maggio Musicale, said that the Florence opera house was also “on the road to recovery” after “restructuring” to meet a €6.5 million deficit. He revealed, however, that the Florence opera house had plugged the gap only by selling off valuable warehouse space.

This week Rocco Buttiglione, the Culture Minister, who at one stage threatened to resign over the cuts, announced that a further €21 million would have to be sliced from the arts budget for Rome and Lazio.