Museo Teatrale alla Scala

The museum beside La Scala began as a civic rescue mission: in 1911 Milanese music lovers acquired a theatre collection and built a museum around it. Its rooms preserve portraits, scores and stage relics from the opera house's history.

Why it matters

Opera history is stored here in objects rather than in recordings. The Museo Teatrale alla Scala gathers the memorabilia of four centuries of performance: portraits of singers and composers, original instruments, stage furniture, costume and set fragments, autograph letters, and the documents of the theatre's artistic life. Its origin story is singular. In 1911 the Parisian antique dealer Jules Sambon auctioned a prestigious theatre collection, and a group around the composer-librettist Arrigo Boito, the artist Lodovico Pogliaghi and the Brera director Ettore Modigliani raised the enormous asking price of 450,000 lire with state help and a public subscription among fifty citizens. Sambon then withdrew the lot because a mysterious buyer wanted it, later revealed as the financier J.P. Morgan. The Milanese persuaded Morgan to step aside, and the museum opened less than two years later in the former Casino Ricordi, the house where Verdi's publisher once ran its musical salon.

What to notice

The rooms document theatre culture from the eighteenth century onward, with stringed instruments and early keyboards, portraits from the bel canto and Verdi eras, and memorials to Giuseppe Verdi and Arturo Toscanini. The marble and stucco interior of the Casino Ricordi building is also part of the collection's setting. The museum has historically been associated with views into the Teatro alla Scala auditorium from its upper-level boxes.

Context and history

The theatre itself, inaugurated in 1778, had accumulated relics for over a century before the museum gave them a home. The Sambon acquisition of 1911-1913 established the core collection and the principle that La Scala's memory should be public property. Successive bequests added the papers and objects of performers, composers and stage designers, and the museum now also manages a documented library and media collection. The Ansaldo Workshops, where sets and costumes are built, connect La Scala's history with the craft of opera production.