The story
The ticket to the Museo Teatrale alla Scala buys something few museums can offer. When no rehearsal or performance is on, the visit opens onto a box on the third tier of the Teatro alla Scala next door, and you look down into the red and gold auditorium that Giuseppe Piermarini built in 1778. The museum itself is a different place from the opera house. It occupies the old Casino Ricordi beside it, and what it collects is the life of the stage.
It started with an auction in Paris. In 1911 a group of Milanese, funded by a public subscription and a government grant, bought the theatrical collection of the antiquarian Jules Sambon, and on 8 March 1913 the museum opened in the Casino Ricordi, next to the theatre. Bombing destroyed the theatre in August 1943. The collections had been moved to safety beforehand, and on 11 May 1946 Arturo Toscanini conducted the concert that reopened the rebuilt hall. During the theatre's restoration the museum moved to Palazzo Busca in 2002 and came back in December 2004, its rooms arranged by the stage designer Pier Luigi Pizzi to follow the 1913 display closely.
The 14 rooms hold busts and portraits of composers, singers and conductors, costumes, stage designs, instruments including the Steinway that belonged to Franz Liszt, and porcelain figures of commedia dell'arte characters. One room gathers what was found in Verdi's room at the Grand Hotel et de Milan, where he died in January 1901: his death mask, the cast of his hand, his travelling writing case. Upstairs the Biblioteca Livia Simoni, started in 1952 with 40,000 volumes left by the critic Renato Simoni, has grown well past 100,000 librettos, letters and designs. Among the portraits is the singer Elena Viganò, painted in 1841 by the French artist Marie-Éléonore Godefroid and shown here on deposit from the state collections.