Teatro Dal Verme
Grand nineteenth-century theatre where a rejected young composer's opera became an overnight sensation.
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About this audio guide
This guide to Teatro Dal Verme in Milan opens in 1883, when an unknown composer named Giacomo Puccini entered his one-act opera Le Villi into a publisher's competition and was disqualified for handwriting the judges called too messy to read. It follows the circle of friends, including composer Arrigo Boito, who pooled their own money to stage the rejected opera here on the thirty-first of May, 1884, in a house that once sat three thousand people across its stalls, two tiers of boxes and a vast upper gallery. The building's story does not end there either: wartime bombing later gutted it and stripped its cupola of every scrap of metal.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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