Opéra de Nice

The Opéra de Nice is identified by the four statues of the Muses—Euterpe, Melpomène, Thalie, and Terpsichore—standing atop its northern façade on the rue Saint-François de Paule. This building replaced an earlier theater that stood on the same site for over a century. In eighteen eighty-one, during a performance of Gaetano Donizetti’s opera Lucia di Lammermoor, a gas leak caused a catastrophic fire that completely destroyed the previous structure and resulted in sixty-three deaths.