Il Teatro della Pergola
La Pergola is the historic theatre of Florence and it has one of the oldest and richest history of all theatres in Italy. Built in 1656 by Ferdinando Tacca, on behalf of the Academy of Real Estate, was inaugurated during the Carnival of 1657 with the opera funny Il Podestà di Colognole by Giovanni Andrea Moniglia. From 1661 until the early 90s the Teatro della Pergola followed countless restorations also caused by the 1966 flood that hit hard the city of Florence.
After being declared “monument of national interest” by the Minister of Education Department in 1925, in October 1942 it was given to the Academy ETI ( Entity Theatre Italian) which still owns the property.
The Pergola Theatre hosts also a complex of structures and initiatives aimed to the knowledge, to the study and to the deepening of critical theory and practice of theatrical collections, under the name Library Spadoni visited by students, researchers, but also normal viewers curious to learn more about the history of theater.
The genre so-called Melodrana was born at La Pergola Theatre and it developed from the actual opera. In the eighteenth century was one of the best Italian theaters and the Grand Duke Pietro Leopoldo attended it assiduously.
Many first-nights were actuated at La Pergola starting in the XVIII century with the music opera of Luigi Cherubini, Giuseppe Verdi’s Macbeth finishing in the nineteenth century .
