Grazie a Luchino Visconti.

22 September 2026 – 31 March 2027

Luchino Visconti di Modrone, born in Milan on 2 November 1906 and died in Rome on 17 March 1976, was one of the great intellectuals of the twentieth century, not only in Italy.

A member of a branch of an aristocratic family that had played a major role in the history of Milan, he devoted himself – with consuming passion – to music, literature, horse riding, art, theatre and cinema: the latter being the field for which he is best known today (from Ossessione to Senso, from Rocco and His Brothers to The Leopard, from Death in Venice to Ludwig).

These intense commitments, undertaken with an unrelenting sense of duty, must be viewed alongside a strong sense of civic responsibility, acquired in Paris in the 1930s, during the time of the Popular Front, alongside the director Jean Renoir (son of the Impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste), whom he met through the fashion designer Coco Chanel. This experience led him to take the side of the poor and the oppressed, to contribute to the Resistance, to fight against censorship and ultimately to become a communist.

Visconti’s entire life, including his professional career, was marked by his relationship with Teatro alla Scala, where he created productions – most of them illuminated by the presence of Maria Callas – that went down in history: above all, the 1955 production of La traviata. Those productions – so rich in visual qualities and respectful of musical expression, yet so innovative as to provoke controversy and dissent – sparked an interest in opera among sections of society that had traditionally not regarded it as a cultural pursuit.

For this reason, fifty years after his death, Teatro alla Scala wishes to pay tribute to him with an expression of gratitude.

This is not the first tribute that La Scala has dedicated to the great Milanese director. As early as 1978, on the occasion of the Bicentenary season, it hosted the exhibition Visconti: il teatro, which had first opened at the Teatro Comunale in Reggio Emilia in 1977. The exhibition brought together more than nine hundred objects and sought to trace a kind of intellectual biography of the director. On that occasion, Giovanni Testori – author of a memorable portrait of Visconti, as well as of L’Arialda and La monaca di Monza, both staged by the director, and one of the sources of inspiration for Rocco and His Brothers – publicly reconciled himself with the memory of his friend, with whom he had broken relations in 1972. He asserted the need for “a critical record that entrusts certain achievements of culture to something more enduring than the admiring memory of ‘those who were there’.”

Since 1977, exhibitions devoted to Visconti – featuring sketches, costume designs, costumes, photographs, documents and more, and often curated by members of the director’s circle, particularly Caterina d’Amico, daughter of the great screenwriter Suso Cecchi d’Amico, who had worked alongside the director since the mid-1940s – have become almost a genre in their own right. Some have retraced his entire career (including one held in Milan in 1981, at the Castello Sforzesco, involving numerous figures ranging from Strehler to Ronconi, Fellini to Antonioni, Guttuso to Scorsese, and loans from many institutions), while others have focused on specific areas of his work, from his collaborations with the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino to his particular predilection for Giuseppe Verdi.

This exhibition, however, focuses exclusively on Visconti’s relationship with La Scala, to which his family had been connected for several generations. It is a story that accompanied Luchino from childhood, when he regularly attended the theatre from the family box (the fourth box on the first tier, on the left-hand side, very close to the proscenium), through to the final phase of his career, when he was commissioned – although illness prevented him from carrying it out – to direct Wagner’s Ring cycle, in preparation for the centenary of its first performance at Bayreuth in 1876. The contract stipulated that, on the theatre’s posters, Visconti’s name would be printed in the same size and typeface as that of the conductor.

The present exhibition, in which almost all the material on display comes from the collections of La Scala – whose archives remain only partially explored and therefore still contain new discoveries – occupies the spaces of the Livia Simoni Library, once again transformed by Margherita Palli into an arsenal of apparitions. This time, almost a Brechtian féerie, deliberately ideological.