PESARO, Italy — The collapse of Italy’s governmental coalition this week made only a gentle splash in this Adriatic beach town. Every summer, thousands of Italian families spend their seaside vacations here, mingled with opera fans who come to celebrate the town’s most famous native son, Gioachino Rossini, at the Rossini Opera Festival — perhaps the world’s most seductively charming annual opera event.

This summer is the 40th iteration of the festival — which, through the cultivation of musicological research and the preparation of new performance scores, has helped contribute to a worldwide Rossini renaissance. Today he is probably better appreciated as a composer than at any time since his prime in the 1820s, when he was the most popular composer in Europe — better loved than Beethoven, and hailed by Stendhal as a musical Napoleon who had conquered the continent.

Born in Pesaro in 1792, and already famous by 20, he composed several dozen operas and then gave up the genre forever at the end of the 1820s, though he lived for another 40 years. The Rossini Festival presents his stage works in rotation, this year featuring his Assyrian-Babylonian epic “Semiramide” and two lesser known works of his youth, “Demetrio e Polibio” and “ L’Equivoco Stravagante .”