Tickets to La Scala

Website teatroallascala.org has all the information you will need to book tickets and select seats at La Scala. My husband and I attended a performance there a few years ai and had no problems getting good seats. Each seat has a small screen with available translations of the music if you want to look at it.

Thanks! Apparently different people have different experiences booking on line. I suppose that’s not surprising; it might depend on the opera or time of year I suppose. I’m hoping for the best.

I'll just mention that many years ago when on a student budget, I got a ticket at the last minute for the cheapest seat available. The seat was tiny -- not so much in leg room (though that might have been somewhat cramped) but sideways. All I could think about during the performance was how on earth a woman wearing a hoop skirt could fit in -- as well as the age of the building and how we're often told people were smaller in past centuries. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-are-we-getting-taller/

So, to the extent you're making the effort to get good seats, I think that is the right idea.

When I bought tickets for an opera a few years ago, the website included a photo of what your expected view would be from each seat. The better views are from the outside of the box, further from the stage as you face it, when you pick a box near the corners or in the sides of the theater. This probably doesn't make sense, but hopefully they still have the view photos. Another American had bought the seat next to me in the inside, and spent most of the opera standing to see it better. The box had chairs in front, counter stools behind, and bar stools behind thise. No backs on the stools, which is another reason to sit at the outside so you can put your back against the wall and still see the stage. The box also has 2 captioning screens at the front which we set to English and Italian (the others in the box were italian). Not sure what happens if you have three different language speakers there, but seeing an opera here instead of just a tour is so worth it.

I’’m not sure by what you mean by outside? With the box and row of seats in front, which direction is outside? The front seats? Thanks.

Apparently I didn't do my homework well enough when I went to an opera there. My seats were really bad, even though not so far back in the theater. My advice is to orient yourselves as nearly square with the stage as possible, and not worry so much about being close. As someone else pointed out, you can click on the empty seat to see the view from there; it's a little prone to glitches, but keep clicking till you get it to work. But envision what the view will be like if parts of the opera occur far back from the front of the stage; just because you have a good view of the front of the stage from the side box doesn't mean you would be able to see all the action.

Yes I would agree that if you are in a side box you want to be in the front row (although I must say that the two people in the front row of my box couldn't really see either, at least not without standing up to lean out of the box and crane their necks to try to see where some of the action was taking place). But if I had it to do over again, I would go for the rear of the theatre with a good straight-on view of the action.

In spite of my experience with seeing, I had a wonderful time there, just soaking up the ambiance and listening to the divine music. So definitely go.

The above is a better description than I gave. The seats and boxes are arranged in a horseshoe shape with the stage in the ioennng of the horse shoe. (See pics online). Most of the seats, at least around the sides, are in boxes. The area at the back, furthest away from the stage are the more straight on view, as are orchestra level. Guess which seats are the the most expensive?

The more affordable seats are on the sides in these boxes. Each box has 5 or 6 seats: front, middle, and back. Each of these are different prices too. The walls between the boxes restrict views, so people on what I think of as the inside any really see the stage. If you look at photos it makes more sense. It's not like a typical theater here, which makes it interesting, but they probably added the "view from seat" photos to limit complaints from those annoying foreigners. :)

Besides trying to get seats as close to the center as possible, if you do have box seats, the front row is best. The seats in the boxes aren't raked, so if you have someone tall in front of you, it may be difficult to see. The website will tell you when tickets for each performance go on internet sale, and if you can get tickets as soon as that happens, you'll have a better chance of good seats. Like any other opera house, subscriptions take away lots of good seats, but probably not all. Last time I bought tickets, a couple of years ago, I got up in the middle of the night my time to get tickets for my date as soon as they went on sale and that worked out OK. Did the same thing for the Paris Opera last year. If you do that, you might want to alert your credit card that a large euro sale at a very odd hour is real--otherwise, you could wind up with your seats in your cart and have trouble paying while the time in which to do so before the seats are released dwindles. I had the problem once and a phone call in advance prevents it.