Teatro alla Scala

Inaugurated in 1778 with a Salieri opera and rebuilt after wartime bombing, Teatro alla Scala is the reference stage of Italian opera. Verdi's premieres, Toscanini's baton and the world's most demanding loggione all belong here.

Why it matters

La Scala is where the history of Italian opera was argued out in public. Built to replace the Royal Ducal Theatre destroyed by fire in 1776, under the auspices of Empress Maria Theresa of Austria, it opened on 3 August 1778 with Antonio Salieri's Europa riconosciuta. Giuseppe Piermarini's neoclassical facade conceals what matters: an acoustic and a social machine, with its tiers of boxes owned by Milanese families and a loggione whose verdicts could make or break a career. Rossini, Donizetti, Bellini and above all Verdi — Nabucco's 1842 triumph — fixed the house at the centre of operatic Europe, and its premieres of Otello, Falstaff, Madama Butterfly and Turandot wrote the last chapters of the repertoire's greatest works.

What to notice

Stand in the foyer and look for the bust of Giuseppe Piermarini, then step into the auditorium: six tiers of boxes, a paper-thin line between the royal box and the cheapest gallery seats, and the famous ringing clarity of the sound. On the stage floor, notice the rake and the understated machinery that serves one of the world's largest opera companies. The theatre's postwar story is written into the building itself — bombed in 1943, it was reconstructed and reopened on 11 May 1946 with Arturo Toscanini conducting a concert that has entered legend.

Context and history

The theatre took its name from the church of Santa Maria alla Scala, demolished to make room; the box owners of the old Ducal funded the new building in exchange for their land and renewed boxes, a property arrangement that shaped Milanese social life for two centuries. The house that Piermarini designed originally held some 3,000 people; today's capacity stands at around 2,030. Through the nineteenth century the theatre and the Risorgimento shared an audience — the chorus of Nabucco became an unofficial anthem — and through the twentieth its musical directorship read like a roll call of conducting history. The Museo Teatrale alla Scala, entered from the foyer, preserves costumes, portraits, set designs and instruments that trace this story.