Teatro Fraschini, Opera house in Pavia, Italy.
Teatro Fraschini is an opera house in the center of Pavia with a bell-shaped auditorium designed to carry sound evenly across the room. Several tiers of red seats rise above the parterre, while gilded details and painted ceilings cover the interior walls.
The building was designed between 1771 and 1773 by Antonio Galli da Bibiena, commissioned by local noble families. In the mid-1800s, it was renamed after Gaetano Fraschini, a tenor who was born in Pavia.
The theatre's name honours Gaetano Fraschini, a tenor born in Pavia, after the municipality bought the building in 1869. Boxes were sold to private owners from the start, and many still keep their 18th-century stuccoes and frescoes, each decorated to the buyer's own taste. On the second tier a bread oven remains visible, a trace of the dinners and card games once held in the boxes.
The theater is generally accessible during the performance season, which runs from October through January. It is worth checking the program in advance, as guided visits outside of performances are rarely available.
Antonio Galli da Bibiena was known mainly as a set designer, not as a builder of permanent structures. His way of thinking about stage space directly shaped the form of the auditorium, which sets this building apart from other theaters of its time.
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