Teatro Lirico

About

The Teatro Regio Ducale, the court theatre of the Royal Palace of Milan, was destroyed by fire on February 26, 1776. With the city deprived of its only theatre, Giuseppe Piermarini was commissioned to design and build two new theatres on land surrounding the Palace. The church of Santa Maria della Scala was demolished to build the Teatro alla Scala. A second theatre was built nearby, on the site of the Scuole Cannobiane and was called the Teatro alla Canobbiana. The Teatro alla Scala was intended for the more aristocratic audiences, while the Cannobiana was considered the theater for the public at large.

It was inaugurated on August 21, 1779 (a little more than year after the opening of La Scala) with an opera buffa and ballet by Salieri. Like La Scala and many Italian opera houses of the time, it was built in a horseshoe shape, surmounted by a cupola, with four tiers of boxes and a gallery (or loggione ). For nearly a century it was Milan's second opera house.

By the 1880s, with the increasing lack of public funds and fewer and fewer private subscriptions, the Teatro alla Canobbiana had fallen on hard times. In 1894, it was taken over by Edoardo Sonzogno and renamed the Teatro…