Inside La Scala Boxes: Milanese Stories

Inside La Scala Boxes: Milanese Stories (Italian: Nei palchi della Scala. Storie milanesi) is a short film by Francesca Molteni. Audio in Italian with English subtitles.

"Is it raining, is it snowing outside la Scala? What does it matter?
All the best company is come together in 180 theatre boxes."
- Stendhal

The box is the main architectural element of an italian-style theater like La Scala, where the most important Milanese families have always owned at least one to assert their social prestige. The exhibition about La Scala’ s boxes, by Pier Luigi Pizzi, wants to explore the evolution of the Theatre’s public, since its foundation until the post-war period, when “palchettisti” were replaced by subscribers.

Here we pass through the story of the most important Milanese families, as Trivulzio, Litta, Belgiojoso, and Visconti, whose histories are interlaced to the patriots’ ones, as Luigi Porro Lambertenghi, Federico Confalonieri and Silvio Pellico, remembering also great artists as Stendhal, Foscolo, Parini and Manzoni.

This important historic research has seen the collaboration between Teatro alla Scala, Conservatorio Giuseppe Verdi di Milano and Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense.