Corso di Porta Romana, for many centuries the center of city elegance, was the place of choice for the construction, in 1803, of a new large theater. The area was that of the former convent of San Lazzaro, purchased by Giuseppe Carcano, who had already opened a private theater in his palace in 1797, a space that soon became insufficient to accommodate the large audience that attended it.
To build it, the architect Luigi Canonica took La Scala as a model and in just eight months he built the Carcano Theater, a theater with five tiers of boxes including the gallery, a vault decorated with stucco and gilding, neoclassical ornaments and also a pastry shop and trattoria. inside.
The scenes of the Carcano Theater are trodden over time by composers such as Gioacchino Rossini, Gaetano Donizetti, Vincenzo Bellini and Niccolò Paganini (who was elected first violinist in the world here) and artists such as Gustavo Modena, Adelaide Ristori, Eleonora Duse and Ermete Novelli who own here he bid farewell to the scenes.
One of the largest halls in the city of Milan, a place of choice for hosting major city events in terms of livability, hospitality and comparison, today the Carcano Theater is for the “Milanese” an institution of the city in the heart of the city. Enzo Jannacci knew it well, singing it in the song “Veronica”.
Since 2021, the Teatro Carcano in Milan has a female artistic direction, associated with two important names in Milanese and national cultural history such as Lella Costa, actress, and Serena Sinigaglia, director.
The 2022-23 theatrical season is outlined with four key principles: attention to the most urgent themes of contemporaneity, the transversal and dialectical position in the choices and points of view, the centrality of the female universe and direct participation or the construction of a large community of reference.
No tears with the past, with the great masters who preceded us, and at the same time a careful look at the future, at the changes taking place, in defense of the most sacred values of humanism.
The Carcano is today a theater capable of inserting itself with agility between the folds of our time in a constant oscillation: between past and present, classic and contemporary, tragic and comic, prose and music, thought and movement, inside and out …
Info: Teatro Carcano Milano