Giorgio Gaber Opera Theater Milan – Guided Tour

We experience the reopening of the Giorgio Gaber Opera House, a famous stage in Milan.

Finally ready to reopen to citizens, the Giorgio Gaber Opera House recounts an important page in Milan‘s history, starting from the time of Habsburg rule. The commission for this building-known as the Teatro alla Cannobiana-was then given byArchduke Ferdinand to architect Giuseppe Piermarini, with the intention of creating a dual “theater system” in the city: on the one hand the major theater, La Scala, and on the other a smaller, “popular” theater, precisely the present-day Teatro Lirico. The name Teatro alla Cannobiana derived from the choice of the site where the new Milanese stage was to be erected, in strictly neoclassical forms: in the abandoned area of the Cannobian schools, a few steps from the Royal Palace, deprived of its Teatro Regio Ducale following a serious fire that broke out in the carnival of 1776.
Similar in structure to the Teatro alla Scala (because of its typical horseshoe shape and system of overlapping orders, boxes and loggioni), the Teatro alla Cannobiana was inaugurated on August 21, 1779, a year after the Scala stage. Since then, the building has had alternating fortunes, destined to different functions according to the historical and cultural moments that the city went through: it was an opera house, a movie theater, a replacement stage for La Scala when the latter was severely damaged by bombing in 1943, and still a venue for political gatherings and acclaimed concerts. A first-rate cultural center for Milan, it has been closed to the public since the late 1990s and today it is alive again and can be visited with our guides!

After restoration, the Lyric Theatre is back to shine

The Giorgio Gaber Opera House now has a face that is largely different from that of Piermarini‘s time, as a result of the transformations that took place between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and a long series of restorations that were more or less respectful of the original design. The latest excellent conservative intervention not only provided for the plant renovation of the theater, but also recovered its decorations and stratigraphy, giving back to Milan an architectural jewel all to be discovered and enhanced. Guided tours accompany our gaze to admire the building’s most precious decorative details. Moving among the foyer, stalls, gallery and boxes, we can imagine the Piermarinian structure and at the same time appreciate the substantial renovation implemented in 1939 by architect Cassi Ramelli, following a fire that had heavily damaged the Teatro Lirico in 1938. Here, then, are the splendid colored marble floors, the stucco work on the ceilings, the splendid chandeliers – now partly reconstructed on the basis of the original prototypes – or the magnificent mosaic by Roberto Aloi that, at the theater’s entrance, welcomes visitors in a riot of masks and musical instruments!