Inside La Scala's Boxes. Milanese Stories

8th November 2019 – 30th September 2020

Is it raining, is it snowing outside la Scala? What does it matter?
All the best company is come together in 180 theatre boxes.
- Stendhal

The exhibition about La Scala’ s boxes, by Pier Luigi Pizzi, wants to explore the evolution of the Theatre’s public, since its foundation until the post-war period, when “palchettisti” were replaced by subscribers. It concerns a prestigious story which explains all the Italian society’s trasformation in the last two centuries, demostrating how La Scala, with its elegant interns and his illustrious inhabitants, has always been a benchmark, the centre of the culture and the costume of our country. Fondamental for the expositive path, it will be an important database which shows the map of the stages’ owners and the Theatre’s guests, from 1778 to 1920, when the La Scala was expropriated. Here we pass through the story of the most important Milanese families, as Trivulzio, Litta, Belgiojoso, and Visconti, whose histories are interlaced to the patriots’ ones, as Luigi Porro Lambertenghi, Federico Confalonieri and Silvio Pellico, remembering also great artists as Stendhal, Foscolo, Parini and Manzoni.
This important historic research has seen the collaboration between Teatro alla Scala, Conservatorio Giuseppe Verdi di Milano and Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense.

The box is the main architectural element of an Italian-style theater like La Scala, where the most important Milanese families have always owned at least one to assert their social prestige

The history of the audience at La Scala is also the history of Milan and Italy. La Scala has always been at the center of the country's great historical and social changes.