La Scala, Milan: Tickets, Tours and the Museum, Explained

The house that rose from a fire

Milan's earlier theatre, the Teatro Regio Ducale, burned down after a carnival gala. Ninety wealthy Milanese who owned boxes there petitioned for a replacement, Empress Maria Theresa approved the plan, and Giuseppe Piermarini's neoclassical theatre rose on the site of the church of Santa Maria della Scala, which gives the house its name. It opened on 3 August 1778 with Salieri's L'Europa riconosciuta.

The building was financed by selling boxes, and the owners decorated them so lavishly that Stendhal was impressed. For decades the theatre was also a casino and a meeting place for all of Milanese society. It was rebuilt to its current layout of about 1,987 seats in 1907, bombed badly in 1943, and reopened in 1946 with a concert conducted by Arturo Toscanini and a soprano solo by Renata Tebaldi.

The consequence for you is simple: what you see on Piazza della Scala is a 1778 shell with a wartime and postwar interior, which is why the guided stories matter.

Why the house matters

Verdi has a special, stormy relationship with this stage. He withheld his work for years after his Giovanna d'Arco was modified in 1845, then later conducted his Requiem here, and both Otello and Falstaff received their premieres in this house. The gallery above the boxes, the loggione, seats the loggionisti, the most critical opera fans in Italy, whose boos are remembered for decades.

The theatre runs its own chorus, ballet, orchestra and the Filarmonica della Scala, and trains the next generation at the La Scala Theatre Academy. The season opens every 7 December, the feast of Sant'Ambrogio, Milan's patron saint, and every performance must end before midnight, so long operas start earlier.

If you want to compare this with other great houses, our pages on La Fenice, the Teatro San Carlo and the Arena di Verona each make a different case. For the whole picture see opera houses in Italy.

The museum rooms

You enter the Museo Teatrale alla Scala from Largo Ghiringhelli 1, and the museum sits inside the theatre itself, reached from the foyer. It opened in 1913 around a large private collection bought at auction two years earlier. The rooms hold costumes, set designs, autograph scores and historical instruments, plus paintings of musicians and actors.

Look for the precious ceramic figures of commedia dell'arte characters and the board games that used to be played in the theatre's foyer, a reminder that this house was once as much a club as a playhouse. Displays also cover Eleonora Duse, the famous stage actress, and Italian theatrical history beyond opera.

On the second floor sits the Biblioteca Livia Simoni, formed in 1952 from a donated collection of 40,000 volumes and now holding some 140,000 works on theatre, opera and ballet, including composers' correspondence. It is a working library rather than a stop on the visit route, but guided tours often mention it.

The auditorium view, and the honest catch

Every option, from the plain museum ticket up, ends the same way: a look into the auditorium from a third-tier box. From there you see the horseshoe of tiers, the galleries and one of the largest stages in Italy.

The catch is real and you should plan around it. The view happens only when no rehearsal, performance or private event is on, and on many days the hall is closed to visitors entirely. That is the theatre's schedule, not the tour operator's fault, and no ticket or tour guarantees it. If seeing the hall matters more than anything else, go early, pick a weekday, and treat the museum as the guaranteed part of your visit.

Opening hours and closures

The museum opens every day 09:30-17:30, with last admission at 17:00. It closes on 7, 25 and 26 December, 1 January, Easter, 1 May and 15 August. On 24 and 31 December it closes early at 15:00.

The 7 December closure is deliberate: that is the season opening, the feast of Sant'Ambrogio, and the theatre belongs to the gala that night. Time needed is about an hour on your own, or up to 1.5 hours on a guided visit, in our estimate.

For a performance, gallery seats are the local's trick: about 140 loggione seats for operas are sold on the day of the performance, two hours before curtain, listed at the theatre first and then online, from $14.49 (€13) for the lowest listed price. Performance tickets otherwise run from those day-sold gallery seats to several hundred euros for stalls at premieres, and are sold by the theatre at teatroallascala.org and the box office.

The dress code, jeans included

The official rule for visitors to the auditorium is blunt: shorts and sleeveless T-shirts are refused entry, and the ticket is not refunded. That applies to anyone going into the hall, including museum visitors looking in from a box.

So, can you wear jeans? Yes. Jeans are not on the refused list. What matters is covering shoulders and avoiding shorts and tank tops.

For evening performances the custom is tiered: stalls and boxes dress up, dark suit and dark dress, while the galleries are smart casual. If you have a performance night planned, our general guide to the opera dress code in Italy covers what to pack.

Quiet times, in our estimate: the first hour after the 09:30 opening on weekdays, and any weekday that is not a rehearsal day. Opera in Milan draws its biggest crowds around the season opening in December.

Finding the right door

There are two entrances and people mix them up. The theatre entrance for performance ticket holders is on Piazza della Scala, at Via Filodrammatici 2. The museum entrance, which is where every tour and ticket here meets, is at Largo Ghiringhelli 1, around the corner on the piazza itself.

The walk from Milan Cathedral takes you the length of the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, Italy's oldest active shopping arcade, built between 1865 and 1877 under its glass and cast-iron dome. Look down in the central octagon for the mosaic of the Turin bull, which tradition says brings luck if you spin three times with your heel on it, and which has been restored after the damage the tradition causes.

Allow buffer time if you have a fixed tour slot. The Galleria is a bottleneck at midday, and the half-day tour that starts near Largo Cairoli has a strict rule: late arrivals on that tour lose the Last Supper slot, which is fixed.

Three ways to arrive

Milan's centre is compact, so most visitors walk, but the metro and tram both work. However you arrive, aim for the museum door at Largo Ghiringhelli 1, ten minutes before your slot.

A note on the Arcimboldi

Do not confuse the two. From early 2002 to late 2004, while La Scala was being renovated, the company performed at the new Teatro degli Arcimboldi in the Pirelli-Bicocca district. It is a different venue in a different part of the city, so check the address on any booking.

Choosing your time budget

A plain museum visit takes about an hour, and guided visits run one hour to ninety minutes. The combination tours stretch to two hours for the Duomo pairing, or a 3.5-hour half day with the Last Supper.

Our pick for most visitors is the La Scala Theater and Museum Tour with Entry Tickets: a guided hour, entry included, at $33, which is only $15 above the plain ticket and gets you the stories of the house from a licensed guide. If you are a first-timer with one day in Milan, take the Half-Day Tour of Last Supper, Duomo & La Scala instead and accept that La Scala is one stop among four.

Whatever you choose, book a morning slot. The hall is more likely to be open before companies settle into afternoon rehearsals, in our estimate, and the museum is quieter at opening.

Three routings that work

These are the three plans we would actually run, matched to how much of Milan you want to see.

If you want more theatre

Milan rewards a second visit. The Teatro degli Arcimboldi area apart, the strongest next stops are La Fenice in Venice, the Teatro Massimo in Palermo, the largest opera house in Italy, and the summer Arena di Verona festival. Our hub on opera tours in Italy strings several houses into one trip, and where to stay for opera covers the hotel question near La Scala.

The list

A few details from the house's history that most walk past.

• The theatre was built on the demolished site of the church of Santa Maria della Scala, which is where the name comes from Wikipedia: La Scala.
• When it opened in 1778 the theatre was also a casino, with gamblers sitting in the foyer, and the pit had no chairs: spectators stood Wikipedia: La Scala.
• Until electric light arrived in 1883, the stage was lit by 84 oil lamps and the rest of the theatre by around a thousand more, with rooms full of water buckets against fire Wikipedia: La Scala.
• In 2006 tenor Roberto Alagna left the stage mid-performance of Aida after being booed by the loggione, and his understudy replaced him on the spot without a costume change Wikipedia: La Scala.
• The museum's library holds some 140,000 works on theatre, opera and ballet, grown from a 40,000-volume donation in 1952 Wikipedia: Museo Teatrale alla Scala.