Grazie a Luchino Visconti

In spring 1954 La Scala pulled a Visconti ballet after its last rehearsal: the superintendent feared how the audience would take bicycles on stage. Mario e il mago, from Thomas Mann's story, opened two years later and gets its own room here. Milan has since made its peace with bicycles, BikeMi racks and all.

Seven rooms in the museum's Biblioteca Livia Simoni follow Visconti's eight Scala productions, most of them with Maria Callas, drawn almost entirely from the theatre's own archive: sketches, costume designs, photographs, props, press cuttings and costumes Callas wore. You hear the opening-night Prelude and applause of the 1955 Traviata, a production of which no film exists. The shows he never made are here too, from a Falstaff Toscanini asked for to a Wagner Ring that illness stopped.

Come for the opera house, not the cinema. Il Giornale della Musica found the library space cramped for a show this size. The museum is open daily 9:30 to 17:30, last entry 17:00.