ABSTRACT
The Piccolo Teatro di Milano was founded by Paolo Grassi and Giorgio Strehler in 1947. Their intention was to assist Italian theatre to catch up with the rest of European culture after the bourgeois, even petit-bourgeois, domination of the fascist years: ‘From 1903 to 1943, what triumphed on the stages of Italy was not even a neo-classical theatre, it was theatre of adultery, cuckoldry, the worst kind of boulevard theatre, French theatre at its worst.’ 1
