Teatro della Pergola

The Teatro della Pergola is one of Italy's oldest opera houses in the center of Florence, in Via della Pergola. It was built in 1656 by the architect Ferdinando Tacca and opened during the carnival in 1657 with the opera buffa, Il podestà di Colognole by Giovanni Andrea Moneglia.

First used as a court theater, it was opened after 1718 and for public events. The operas of Mozart played here for the first time in Italy, Donizetti Parisina and Rosamunde d' Inghilterra, Verdi's Macbeth ( first version 1847) and Mascagni Rantzau and Luigi Dallapiccola's Volo di notte were premiered here.

The theater was built as a wooden structure. It was the first theater of Italy lodges in a horseshoe shape with three pillared ranks and an overlying gallery. The hall holds about 1,000 places. The floor of the auditorium can be raised to stage level to turn the theater into a continuous ballroom. In 1750 the building was provided with stone walls and modernized by a banking hall with granite columns in neoclassical style in the 19th century. 1925, the theater was declared a national monument.

A former ballroom, the Saloncino, holds about 324 seats and is used as a concert hall. In the basement is a small museum.

Curiosity

1834 Antonio Meucci installed in the theater, one of the first phones the history of technology to communicate between the different floors of the house. The unit still exists today.