Teatro Coccia

Giuseppe Oliverio's house of about 1,500 seats, opened on 22 December 1888 with Les Huguenots under Arturo Toscanini, and built partly from the fabric of the theatre it replaced. That earlier house, Cosimo Morelli's Teatro Nuovo of 1779, had stood on the same site and had taken the name Teatro Coccia in 1873 for Carlo Coccia, for thirty years master of the music at Novara cathedral; it was pulled down in 1886 and the name carried over to the new building. The revised Manon Lescaut was first given here in 1893 and Tosca followed in 1900. A restoration in 1993 brought the auditorium down to 918 seats.