Piazza Vittorio Gui, 1Teatro del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino is a major opera house in Florence and the main concert venue of the international festival "Maggio Musicale Fiorentino". The Teatro del Maggio is the permanent home of the Orchestra and Choir of the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino as well as the main venue of the prestigious Festival, the oldest in Italy and one of the most important in Europe together with Salzburg and Bayreuth and which gives - precisely - the name of the great architectural complex. The Teatro del Maggio collects in itself and continues, the glorious history of the Municipal Theater.
It was originally built as the open-air amphitheater, the Politeama Fiorentino Vittorio Emanuele, which was inaugurated on 17 May 1862 with a production of Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor and seated 6,000 people. It became the focus of cultural life in the city. After closure caused by fire, it reopened in April 1864 and acquired a roof in 1882. By 1911 it had both electricity and heating.
In 1930 the building was taken over by the city authorities who renamed it the Teatro Comunale. Bombing during the Second World War damaged the building once again, and other problems closed it for three years in 1958. Finally, in May 1961, the then-modernized theatre reopened with Verdi's Don Carlo. It had become a 2,000-seat elliptically shaped auditorium consisting of a large orchestra section, one tier of boxes, and two wide semicircular galleries, which betray the building's amphitheater origins.
As the theatre became more closely associated with Italy's first and most important music festival, the annual Maggio Musicale Fiorentino which had begun in 1931 as a triennial festival and, except for the war years, became an annual one after 1937, its name was changed once again for the festivals to the Teatro del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino.