La Scala
— six tiers of gold, holding their breath.
Not only on a wall.
“An opera house in Milan, opened on the third of August, 1778, and named for the church that stood here before it. The season opens every year on the seventh of December, the feast of Sant'Ambrogio, with the city in evening clothes and a televised broadcast running on national television. From the loggione, the gallery under the roof, the rest of Europe's opera knew it was being judged. Allied bombs took the auditorium in 1943; Toscanini conducted the night it reopened, three years on. The gold and the velvet are still the gold and the velvet.
La Scala, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
The place, in three passes.
Teatro alla Scala stands on Piazza della Scala in central Milan, the opera house that has carried the city's musical reputation since the eighteenth century. It opened on the third of August, 1778, replacing the Teatro Regio Ducale, the previous court theatre, which had burned down in February 1776. The neoclassical architect Giuseppe Piermarini built it on the site of the demolished fourteenth-century church of Santa Maria alla Scala, and the church's name passed to the theatre. The horseshoe auditorium holds about two thousand and thirty seats across stalls, four tiers of boxes, and the loggione under the roof. Allied bombing on the night of 15-16 August 1943 destroyed much of the building; the auditorium reopened on 11 May 1946 with a concert conducted by Arturo Toscanini, newly returned from exile.
The season opens every year on the seventh of December, the feast of Sant'Ambrogio, patron saint of Milan. The prima della Scala is the city's largest civic occasion: the President of the Republic, the mayor, the prefect, and a national broadcast on Rai. Inside, the loggione sets the night's verdict. The upper gallery has cheered Verdi's Nabucco at its 1842 premiere and has booed singers off in the second act of works that had survived everywhere else in Europe. The repertoire across the season runs to roughly forty productions of opera, ballet, and concerts, anchored by the resident La Scala orchestra and chorus, with the calendar carrying through to November of the following year.
The theatre stands at Via Filodrammatici 2, a one-block walk from the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II and the Piazza del Duomo. The adjoining Museo Teatrale alla Scala, opened in 1913, holds costumes, instruments, Verdi's death-mask, and a window onto the auditorium when no rehearsal is in progress; admission runs around ten euros. Performance tickets range from about a dozen euros for a loggione standing place to several hundred for a parterre stall. Evening performances begin at twenty-hundred, and the seventh-of-December prima carries a white-tie dress code; most other evenings expect a jacket. The nearest Metro stops are Duomo on lines M1 and M3 and Montenapoleone on line M3.