Giuseppe Pestagalli designed the Teatro Dal Verme in Milan for Count Francesco Dal Verme, and it opened on September 14, 1872 with Meyerbeer's Les Huguenots. The original auditorium had a horseshoe layout with two tiers of boxes, a large gallery and a large cupola. It seated 3,000, with the gallery alone holding over 1,000.
It became one of Italy's leading opera houses. Its premieres included Puccini's Le Villi in 1884 and Leoncavallo's Pagliacci in 1892, and it staged the Italian premiere of Lehár's The Merry Widow in 1907. By the 1930s it was mainly a cinema.
American aerial bombing in the Second World War severely damaged it, and the theatre was partially rebuilt in 1946. A renovation completed in 2001 reopened it that April. The Sala Grande now seats 1,420, and the Fondazione I Pomeriggi Musicali administers it.
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