Pierluigi Pier’Alli has spent more than half a century making theatre in which the director, the set designer, the costume designer, the lighting designer and, later, the video designer are the same person. A new series from the Study Centre for Scenic Arts, published as The Scenographer, opens with him. Masters of Theatre is a 230-page monograph illustrated with more than 200 of his stage designs, issued in two separate editions, one in Italian and one in English.
Pier’Alli was born in Florence in 1948 and studied architecture there. From 1970 to 1982 he led the company Ouroboros, whose productions, among them pieces built on texts by Giuliano Scabia, Samuel Beckett and August Strindberg, travelled to festivals in Nancy, Avignon, Warsaw, WrocÅ‚aw and to the Holland Festival in Amsterdam. In 1982 he moved into opera, beginning at La Scala with three works by Arnold Schoenberg and two by Salvatore Sciarrino.
The production that fixed his reputation was Wagner’s Ring at the Teatro Comunale of Bologna, completed in 1992 with Götterdämmerung conducted by Riccardo Chailly. There he made film a working part of the stage rather than a projection behind it, a language he carried on to La Fenice, Zurich, Lille, Berlin, Rome and Palermo.
The book is written by three voices from inside Italian theatre: Carlo Maria Cella, critic and head of the press office at La Scala during Stéphane Lissner’s years as artistic director; Dino Villatico, music critic of La Repubblica for forty-five years; and the scenic painter Paolino Libralato. Its thread is what Pier’Alli calls the theatre of Utopia, the idea, set out in his Mozart, Music, and His Dream (2013), that a stage without a vision of the future has nothing left to say.
For readers who follow the history of stage design, it is a rare thing: a working archive of one designer’s drawings, gathered while he can still comment on them.
The book
- Title: Masters of Theatre: Pier Luigi Pier’Alli, Theatre Director
- Publisher: SCSA Study Centre Scenic Arts / The Scenographer
- Editions: English and Italian; digital edition, and print edition on request
- Where to find it: thescenographer.org · video presentation
Sources
- The Scenographer, announcement of the Masters of Theatre series, 11 August 2026, and the book page on thescenographer.org
- Sipario, biography of Pier’Alli
- Cultura Toscana, authority record Pier’Alli, Pierluigi (1948)