Cremona had a theatre that in the eighteenth century was turned into a church, and the city was left without one. A group of nobles then decided to build a new one: one marquis provided the land, another the money, and in 1747 the theatre opened with a melodrama. It burned down, and on its ruins another was built from 1806.
What to see
The present building is the one designed by Luigi Canonica, an architect active all over Napoleonic Lombardy: a horseshoe hall, four tiers of boxes and the gallery, with a neoclassical front on the street. In 1907 it was named after Amilcare Ponchielli, the Cremonese composer of the Gioconda.
The theatre is still working, with a season of opera, drama and concerts, and it also hosts the events tied to violin making, which in Cremona is the real industry of identity. It is best visited as a spectator, but guided visits to the hall are organised outside performance times.
Visiting
The theatre is in corso Vittorio Emanuele II, five minutes from the cathedral; you go in with a ticket for the performances or on the guided visits, which must be looked for in the programme. Two hours for a show.
Our editors' tip
Look at the historic calendar of the seasons: first only carnival, then spring, then summer, then autumn. In a few decades a theatre goes from a handful of weeks to almost the whole year, and that calendar is the measure of how far opera was the chief social activity of an Italian city, not one entertainment among others.