The Teatro Municipale Valli is among northern Italy's most beautiful nineteenth-century opera houses. Designed in the Neoclassical style and inaugurated in 1857, it stands on a small piazza adjoining the city's public gardens, with a colonnaded facade that gives it a proper sense of civic occasion. The interior is horseshoe-shaped in the Italian tradition, with four tiers of boxes and plush red velvet throughout.
The theatre hosts a full season of opera and ballet, as well as concerts by visiting orchestras. If you are passing through during the season, it is worth checking the programme — performances here have a local intensity that the bigger houses in Milan or Bologna sometimes lack. Guided tours of the interior are available when productions are not in rehearsal.