San Carlo Theatre

This guide to the San Carlo Theatre in Naples introduces Domenico Barbaja, a former card dealer who talked his way from serving coffee in Milan into running the gambling tables at La Scala, and then into control of Naples's royal theatres. It picks up on the night of February 13, 1816, when a fire tore through the San Carlo during a dress rehearsal and gutted the interior within the hour, leaving King Ferdinand IV demanding a rebuild. Barbaja, the former card dealer, promised the king something that sounded impossible, financed on the same gambling profits that had built his own fortune.