At Bologna, in the Teatro Formagliari (1640), Andrea Sighizzi placed his
boxes en escalier, rising behind each other to give a better view. He
repeated the idea at the Teatro Malvezzi in the same city in 1643, and it
was adopted at Genoa that year by G. A. Falcone in the Teatro Falcone (which survived until World War II), but it had fewer imitators than one would expect. Other celebrated theatres of around the middle of the
century were the Teatro della Sala at Bologna, rebuilt after a fire in 1639;
and the theatre at Piacenza, another Farnese city, designed in 1644 for a hall in the Palazzo Comunale by Cristoforo Rangani, with a proscenium arch and curtain, an auditorium lined with twenty-two Doric columns in imitation marble and two tiers of boxes between them.