Milan, the city and the performing arts. Theatre, dance, music, cinema and more. Milan is not only a city of business, industry, the stock market and finance. It has other moving spirits. Among these is creativity, never for its own sake, but always linked to a search for beautiful and proper things, in a productive marriage between function and aesthetics. From Leonardo onward it is the “poly-technic” that represents the identity of Milan, its endless research, conducted in freedom and which often produces innovation, discoveries, development. Alongside design and fashion, are the performing arts. From Ambrosian chant to the Sforzas’ festivals of wonder all the way to the opening of the Teatro alla Scala, to the triumph of lyric opera which helped to build Italy. The twentieth century saw the arrival of that new factory of the imagination, the movies, with dynamic production houses, then the birth of television and of Carosello, which pushed advertising forward, along with the coming of private television channels. Not only that. Milan has music of every kind, from pop singers to the most advanced avantgarde, from concerts at San Siro to early music in churches. In the theatre, the invention of the public theatre is central: the Piccolo Teatro, which for more than sixty years has been a point of reference for master directors and a training ground for a discerning public, and around which a system of top-level productive bodies has been formed, all the way to the little “off” theatres that continue to produce new ways of looking at the future. Milan is Italy’s capital of the performing arts, with its lights and shadows, its greatness and fragility, with its ambitions and contradictions. These are the elements of a spectacle of the highest level and the curtain is up year round. This volume seeks to tell this story, through a chorus of contributions and thoughts, itineraries through history and an indication of present problems, declines and forecasts, deficiencies and dreams. A plurality of visions accompanied by a fascinating series of images.

Curator:  Antonio Calbi